CentOS-7 1609 Rolling ISOs Now Live

Rolling ISOs

The CentOS Linux team produces rolling CentOS-7 isos, normally on a monthly basis.

The most recently completed version of those ISOs are version 1609 (16 is for 2016, 09 is for September).

The team usually creates all our ISO and cloud images based on all updates through the 28th of the month in question .. so 1609 would mean these ISOs will contain all updates for CentOS-7 through September 28th, 2016.

These rolling ISOs have the same installer as the most recent CentOS-7 point release (currently 7.2.1511) so that they install on the same hardware as our original ISOs, while the packages installed are the latest updates.

This means that the actual kernel that boots up on the ISO is the 7.2.1511 default kernel (kernel-3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64.rpm), but that the kernel installed is the latest kernel package (kernel-3.10.0-327.36.1.el7.x86_64.rpm for the 1609 ISOs).

These normal Rolling ISOs can be downloaded from this LINK and here are the sha256sums:
CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1609-01.iso:
3948f7a31a8693b2df90dc31252551dcd5aa9d13f4910ad9ce28fcddc247d84f 

CentOS-7-x86_64-Everything-1609-01.iso:
602383c2aa93f6d7df46bd47658dcbf9b9d567108dec56ba60ce46a2f51c6eb2 

CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveGNOME-1609-01.iso:
f6ee8af6814bc58e2c8424db862a443649f3a57b5f85caf63704ab52d5bbac68 

CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveKDE-1609-01.iso:
1349c70e815d46c49d6ea459de6fbc074f5131c803343db18d32987ee78fd303 

CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1609-01.iso:
54721e5e444a3191b18b0fabe1c35e12b65f93aa31732beb7899212d19cab69b 

You can verify the sha256sum of your downloaded ISO following these instructions prior to install.

The DVD ISO contains everything needed to do an install, but still fits on one 4.3 GB DVD.  This is the most versatile install that will fit on a single DVD and if you are new to CentOS this likely the installer you want.  If you pick Minimum Install in this installer, you can do an install that is identical to Minimal ISO.  You can also install many different Workstation and Server installs from this ISO, including both GNOME and KDE.

The Everything ISO has all packages, even those not used by the installer.  You usually do not need this ISO unless you do not have access to the internet and want to install things later from this DVD and not included by the graphical installer.  Most users will not need this ISO, it is > 7 GB but can do installs from a USB key that is big enough to hold it (currently an 8 GB key).

The LiveGNOME ISO is a Basic GNOME Workstation install, but there is no modification or personalization allowed during the install.  It is a much easier install to do, but any extras packages must be installed from the internet later.

The LiveKDE ISO is Basic KDE Workstation install.  It also does not allow modification or personalization until after the install has finished.

The Minimal ISO is a very small and quick install that boots to the command console and has network connectivity and a firewall.  It is used by System Administrators for the minimal install that they can then add functionality to.  You need to know what you are doing to use this ISO.

Newer Hardware Support

As explained above, the normal rolling ISOs boot from the Point Release installer.  Sometimes there is newer hardware that might not be supported in the point release installer, but could be supported with a newer kernel.  This installer is much less tested and is only recommended if you can not get one of the normal installers to work for you.

There are only 2 ISOs in this family, here are the links and sha256sums:

CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1609-99.iso:
90c7148ddccbb278d45d06805dee6599ec1acc585cafd02d56c6b8e32a238fa9 

CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1609-99.iso:
1cfbbc73cc7a0eb17d7fe2fa5b1adf07492e340540603e8e1fd28b52e95f02e3

You can verify the ISO's sha256 sum using this LINK, and the descriptions above are the same for these two ISOs.

CentOS at cPanel 2016

The CentOS team will have a booth at the cPanel 2016 WEIRED Conference in Portland, Oregon at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower on October 3rd through the 5th 2016.

I (Johnny Hughes) will be there to discuss all things CentOS and we may have some guests at the booth from some of our Special Interest Groups and others from the CentOS Community.

If you are planning to be at the conference, please stop by and see us.

CentOS at 2016 Texas Linux Fest

We will have a CentOS Booth at the 2016 Texas Linux Fest on July 8th and 9th in the Austin Texas Convention Center.

Please stop by the CentOS booth for some Swag and discussion.

We will also have several operational CentOS-7 Arm32 devices at the booth, including a Raspberry Pi2, Raspberry Pi3, CubieTruck (Cubieboard3) and CubieTruck Plus (Cubieboard5).  These devices are showcasing our AltArch Special Interest Group, which produce ppc64, ppc64le, armhfp (Arm32), aarch64 Arm64), and i686 (x86 32) architectures of CentOS-7.

We also will be glad to discuss the new things happening within the project, including a number of operational Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that are producing add on software for CentOS including The Xen Hypervisor, OpenStack (via RDO), Storage (GlusterFS and Ceph), Software Collections, Cloud Images (AWS, Azure, Oracle, Vagrant Boxes, KVM), Containers (Docker and Project Atomic).

So, if you have been using CentOS for the past 12 years, all that is happening just like it always has (long lived standard Linux distro with LTS), as well as all the new hypervisor, container and cloud capabilities.

Firefox 38 and TLS less than 1.2

Red Hat released the source code for Firefox 38.  We have (or willbe
today) releasing this for CentOS-5, CentOS-6, and CentOS-7.

It does not, by default, connect to https sites with TLS less than 1.2. 
This means it will not connect to sites on CentOS-5, for example ..
there are many others.

In any event, here is a wiki article that explains potential issues and
workarounds:

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/Firefox38onCentOS

CentOS Dojo at LISA14 in Seattle on November 10th, 2014

Join us at the all day (09:00 to 17:00) CentOS Dojo on Monday, November 10th, 2014 at the LISA14 conference in Seattle, Washington.

There will be at least three CentOS board members there (Johnny Hughes, Jim Perrin, and Karsten Wade).

The current topics include:

• CI environment scaling by Dave Nalley
• DevOps Isn’t Just for WebOps: The Guerrilla’s Guide to Cultural Change by Michael Stahnke
• The EPEL Phoenix Saga by Stephen Smoogen
• Docker in the Distro by Jim Perrin
• Managing your users by Matt Simmons

Visit the CentOS Wiki for more information.

CentOS-6.6 is Released

CentOS 6.6 is now released, see the Announcement.

So, the Continuous Release RPMs where released on 21 October (7 days after RHEL 6.6) and the Full Release was done 28 October (14 days after RHEL 6.6).

Enjoy.

Continuous Release Repository RPMs for CentOS-6.6 Released

The CentOS team has released the Continuous Release (CR) Repository RPMs for CentOS-6.6 into their 6.5/cr tree.  See the Release Announcement.

Now a little more about the release process.

1. Red Hat releases a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  In this case the version is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 (RHEL-6.6), which was released on October 14th, 2014.  With that release by Red Hat comes the source code which RHEL 6.6 is based on.
2. The CentOS team takes that released source code and starts building it for their CentOS release (in this case CentOS-6.6).  This process can not start until the Source Code from Red Hat is available, which in this case was October 14th.
3. At some point, all the Source Code has been built and there are RPMs available, this is normally 1-5 days depending on how many Source RPMs there are to build and how many times the order needs to be changed to get the builds done correctly.
4. After the CentOS team thinks they have a good set of binary RPMs built, they submit them to the QA team (a team of volunteers who do QA for the releases).  This QA process includes the t_functional suite and several knowledgeable system administrators downloading and running tests on the RPMs to validate updating with them works as planned.
5. At this point there are tested RPMs ready, and the CentOS team needs to build an installer tree. This means, take the new RPMs and move them into place in the main tree, remove the older ones RPMs they are replacing, run the build installer to create an installable tree, test that installable tree.  This process can take up to 7 days.
6. Once there is an installable tree, all the ISOs have to be created and tested.  We have to create the ISOs, upload them to the QA process, test them for installs via ISOs (correct sizes, how to split the ISOs, what is on the Live CDs and LiveDVDs to keep them below the max size to fit on media, etc.).  We then also test the installs for UEFI installs, Secure Boot installs (CentOS-7 only), coping to USB Keys and checking the installs that way, etc.  This process can also take up to 7 days.

So, in the process above, we can have vetted binary RPMs ready to go as soon as 5 days after we start, but it may be 14 or more days after that before we have a complete set of ISOs to do a full release.  Thus the reason for the CR Repository.

The CR Repository

The process of building and testing an install tree, then creating and testing several types of ISO sets from that install tree (DVD Installer, Minimum Install ISO, LiveCD, LiveDVD, etc) can take 1-2 weeks after all the RPMs are built and have gone through initial QA testing.

The purpose of the CR repository is to provide quicker access to RPMs for an upcoming CentOS point release while further QA testing is ongoing and the ISO installers are being built and tested.

Updates in the CR for CentOS-6.6

More Information about CR.

CentOS-6.6 Release Notes (Still in progress until the actual CentOS-6.6 release).

Upstream RHEL-6.6 Release Notes and Technical Notes.

Xen4CentOS XSA-108 Security update for CentOS-6

There has been a fair amount of press in the last couple of days concerning Xen update XSA-108, and the fact that Amazon EC2 and Rackspace must reboot after this update:

Rackspace forced to reboot cloud over Xen bug

Amazon Reboots Cloud Servers, Xen Bug Blamed

There are other stories, but those articles cover the main issue.

As KB tweeted, the CentOS-6 Xen4CentOS release is also impacted by this issue and the CentOS team has released CESA-2014:X013 to deal with XSA-108.  There are also 3 other Xen4CentOS updates released:  CESA-2014:X010, CESA-2014:X011, CESA-2014:X012

If you are using Xen4CentOS on CentOS-6, please use yum update to get these security updates ... and like Rackspace and Amazon EC2, you need to reboot your dom0 machine after the updates are applied.

CentOS team at cPanel 2014

The CentOS team will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall for the 2014 cPanel Conference at the Westin Galleria hotel in Houston, Texas from September 30th to October 1st 2014.

CentOS Board members Johnny Hughes (that's me :D) and Jim Perrin will be at the booth whenever the hall is open. 

We are looking forward to lots of discussions and we will have some swag to give out (Tee Shirts .. including the new 10 Year Anniversary tee, Stickers, etc.). We will also be happy to install CentOS on your laptop (or let you do it) ... or if you have a USB key available, we will put a CentOS iso on it for you to use for install later.

If you are going to be at cPanel 2014, come on down and see us!

CentOS Linux 5.11 for x86_64 and i386 is released

The CentOS Linux 5.11 distribution for both the x86_64 and i386 architectures is now released.

If you are running any previous version of CentOS-5 Linux, then you can upgrade simply by using the command:

yum update

ISOs are also available here:

http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/5/isos/

Please see the Release Announcement and Release Notes for more details.

 

Critical Bash updates for CentOS-5, CentOS-6, and CentOS-7

There is a critical CVE issue in all versions CentOS that has been fixed today.  Please update your CentOS with this command:

yum update

Information about this issue can be found here:

http://red.ht/1msy8D6

and here:

http://red.ht/1uZGljA

The CentOS release announcements are here:

CentOS-5, CentOS-6, CentOS-7

If you have any other questions about this issue, you can ask on the CentOS mailing list here.

CentOS Dojo Cincinnati, OH (4 June 2014)

The CentOS team is happy to announce that we will be having a CentOS Dojo on Wednesday, June 4th, 2014 at the University of Cincinnati's Dyer Hall (Map | Register | Info)

CentOS Dojos are a one day event that bring together people from the CentOS communities to talk about systems administration, best practises, and emerging technologies. The emphasis is to find local speakers and tutors to come together and talk about things that they care about most, and to share stories from their experiences working with CentOS in various scenarios.

Both Jim Perrin and I will be there representing the CentOS Board, and there will be several great speakers (details still being worked out on the exact speaker list).

If you are in the Cincinnati area and use CentOS, please register and come to the event.

See you there !

OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014

I will be representing the CentOS Project at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014 on May 12th to 16th, 2014.

The CentOS Linux distribution and RPMs produced by RDO are one of the major ways that OpenStack is now being deployed worldwide (CentOS was the 2nd most deployed Operating System in the latest OpenStack User Survey).

If you are using, or plan to use, RDO on CentOS (or OpenStack Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux) then there are several Red Hat tracks available at the summit that would be very informative.

I am also pretty excited about the Red Hat acquisition of Inktank and I would expect to see some noise about that at the summit as well.  Ceph and GlusterFS make up the current members of our CentOS Storage SIG and I look forward to working with both groups in the future. 

I expect that I will be in the Expo Hall from Monday through Wednesday and I will be somewhere at the Summit on Thursday and Friday as well, so if you see an old dude in a CentOS polo, it's likely me.

CentOS Dojo, São Paulo, Brazil: 5 May 2014

The CentOS Project will be having a Dojo in São Paulo, Brazil on Monday, May 5th, 2014 at Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima 3900 - Cj 81 Itaim Bibi Sao Paul (map, register, info).

CentOS Dojos are one day events, organized around the world, that bring together people from the CentOS Communities to talk about systems administration, best practices in Linux-centric activities and emerging technologies of note. The emphasis is to find local speakers to come together and talk about things that they care about most, and to share stories from their experiences working with CentOS in various scenarios.


This event is sponsored By Red Hat and happens two days before FISL 15 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The CentOS team will also be at FISL 15 and these are our first ever events in South America, so we are pretty excited.

If you are near  São Paulo or Porto Alegre at the beginning of May, please stop by and visit the team.

CentOS Events in the Next Few Weeks

CentOS has 3 events happening in the next month or so.  Please come out and join us at as many of them as you can.

CentOS Dojo in Santa Clara, California on 31 March 2014.

CentOS Dojo in Denver, Colorado on 10 April 2014.

The CentOS Project at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, CA on 14-17 April 2014.

We will have CentOS board members at each of these events.  If you want to find out what is happening the the CentOS world then these are the places to be :)

Createrepo and Parallel Delta RPMs on CentOS-6

Anyone who is using Delta RPMs (AKA - the yum-presto plugin) on CentOS-6 or Fedora knows how much of a PITA it is to generate the drpms.  It takes forever to generate.

Ian Mcleod has posted some new functionality on the Yum Developers mailing list that addresses this issue.

Here is the git repo that contains the new code.

I have created an RPM and SRPM for EL6 that use the tarball from the git repo and add the following functionality:

--delta-workers - The number of worker processes to use for delta
related tasks

--max-concurrent-delta-rpm-size - The maximum total size of uncompressed
rpm payloads that are actively being processed by makedeltarpm at any
given time.

You can get copies of the RPMS from my people.centos.org location for testing. 

The only things that I found with the rpm is:

1.  You will need to also install pyliblzma package from epel to use it.

2.  You should use the same (or lower) number of --delta-workers as compared to --workers 

3.  As discussed in the Yum Developers thread above, you want to make sure to assign a value to --max-concurrent-delta-rpm-size .  The number to assign is bytes ... so 16GB (if you have a 64GB ram machine, and the recommended amount is about 25%) then it would be 16 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 17179869184 (as an example).  That machine also has 24 CPU cores ... so I used 24 for --workers and --delta-workers.

CentOS at Scale 12x

Several members of the CentOS team will be at Scale 12x (http://bit.ly/1hEH6t5) in Los Angeles, California on February 21st to 23nd, 2014.

CentOS will be part of the "Infrastructure.Next at Scale" event ( http://bit.ly/1irKWUm ) event that happens on Friday (21st), and we will have the following talk there:
http://bit.ly/1g2voUB

We will be at the Red Hat Community booth/table on both Saturday and Sunday (22nd and 23rd) with free swag (teeshirts, stickers, etc).

We will have a Birds of a Feather session, details of which will be provided at the table/booth when finalized.

Finally, we will also have a talk titled "CentOS Project Q&A Forum" (http://bit.ly/1bQ5rVS) on Sunday (23rd).

If you are in the Los Angeles area, please stop by and see us at Scale 12x !!!

Kernel-ml, NVIDIA Drivers, and the 3.13.x kernel

ELRepo has a Main Line kernel section to allow using the latest kernel with CentOS-6.  I use this kernel on my laptops and workstations as it usually means better hardware detection and battery life, etc.

If you have the need to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers with this kernel, as I do on one of my laptops, then you would need to install the latest NVIDIA drivers for each kernel.  No one (that I know of at least) maintains an RPM based module for the kernel-ml series, so downloading the latest version of the drivers from NVIDIA's site is how I handle this situation.

Sometimes with a new kernel tree is begun, in this case the 3.13.x kernel tree, the NVIDIA drivers as posted with not work.  This is the current situation with the 3.13.2 kernel (as installed via ELRepo on CentOS 6.5 ) when using the latest NVIDIA drivers (currently version 338.31).

On the web, I found a good blog entry on how to generally fix the issue, so I thought I would go over how to make it work on CentOS-6.

• Enable the ELRepo repository (if required) using their instructions here.
• Install the ELRepo kernel-ml via their instructions here.
• Download the latest NVIDIA Drivers from the NVIDIA site.
• Change the permissions on the downloaded binary file so it can be executed:

chmod 755 NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.38.run

• Extract the NVIDIA drivers with this command in a terminal:

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.38.run -x

• Download the combined (2nd) patch from the above blog and save it (right click, save link as) into the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.38 directory created when extracting the driver above.
• Apply the patch with this command:

patch -p1 < 02_nvidia_3.13.patch

• Reboot into the new kernel (will get console mode, login as root) ... then go to the  NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.38 that contains the patched code.
• Install the patched driver with this command:

./nvidia-installer

The install should now complete in the normal way, and you should be able to boot into the NVIDIA driver on the 3.13.x kernel-ml series from ELRepo on CentOS-6.5

CentOS-6.3 Release

July 9th, 2012 - Today the CentOS Project has released CentOS-6.3.  This release came 18 days after the upstream release of EL 6.3.  The major issues that we had with getting this release out were getting the i386 distribution to boot properly and adjusting the content of DVD-1 and DVD-2 of each architecture to allow for the most common install groups to come from DVD1 and not require DVD2.

Some of the major changes for this release include a move from OpenOffice 3.2.1 to LibreOffice 3.4.5 and the addition of Virtual to Virtual and Physical to Virtual (virt-v2v and virt-p2v) server migration tools to KVM Virtual Machines.  Please see the CentOS-6.3 release notes for more information on these and other features.  The Open H Website has a very good article on what's new in EL6.

We were pretty much ready to release the distribution by Friday, July 6th, but we had to then copy our trees to the several dozen internal mirror servers in the CentOS Project's infrastructure and then open those mirrors up to the more than 500 external mirrors that serve CentOS in more than 75 countries world wide.  While the CentOS Project is doing a point release, you can see what is happen by visiting our QA Development website and looking at the blog entries on the dashboard,

We hope you enjoy CentOS-6.3 !

CentOS Project Release Times

One of the issues we have had in the CentOS Project is that at point release time, we were lagging behind a bit on getting the releases out.  Recently, the CentOS Project has addressed this issue in 3 major ways:

1.  We created the CR repository where we can, if there are delays, push out multiple updates that work together while we take a care of problems with packages that don't build, if we have issues getting the ISOs to properly build, etc. during the point release process.  This gives us an avenue to release pieces of the point release without having to release the whole thing.  We have actually not had to use the CR repository on the last 2 release cycles (CentOS-5.8 and CentOS-6.2) as we got each of them out within 10 days... however, this is an option that we have if we need to get out pieces of the release (like critical updates) if there is any kind of delay in the main process.

2.  We now have corporate sponsors who sponsor 2 CentOS Developers to work on the CentOS Project full time.  That means that we now have 80 paid hours per week of CentOS Project time where we get do nothing but CentOS Project related work.  The sponsors do not ask for anything in return, just faster CentOS updates by the current CentOS developers who get to make the CentOS Project their daily work priority.  This should be huge in preventing future delays.

3.  We have given better tools to the CentOS QA team.  They now see the packages that we are building in the QA IRC channel, the status of the builds on the QA mailing list and we have a scratch build area setup where they can do test builds to help us develop patches for issues, etc.  We have also been using trello for collaboration during point release time to get updates out faster.

The end result of all of these efforts have shown that we can get packages out in a timely manner.  Since January 2012, there have been no updates (outside of point releases) that have taken more than 3 days to push.  In fact, only one package during the entire time has taken more than one day to get released.  As I mentioned before, the last two point releases were also completed very quickly.  Here is some press on that:

5.8 Release

6.2 Release

The bottom line is that the CentOS Project has expended great effort to ensure that point releases of current products will be released in a timely fashion.  With the changes we have put in place and with the ability to do CentOS as our main daily work focus the future looks quite good for timely CentOS updates.