Hello Linux Geeksters. CentOS 7 has been released a while ago, being available only for 64 CPUs, as a 64 bit image. It is the community-driver fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7), being used on both servers and desktop computers, by those who want stability and not bleeding edge technology.
CentOS 7 uses kernel 3.10.0, comes with out-of-the-box support for VMware Tools and 3D graphics drivers, uses OpenJDK-7, implemented systemd, GRUB2 and FirewallD as default, uses XFS as the default filesystem, has support for performing LVM snapshots for either XFS and EXT4 filesystems, got support for UEFI and 40G Ethernet cards and is available in two flavors: GNOME (GNOME 3.8) and KDE (KDE 4.10). Also, by default it comes with the following packages: Firefox 24.5.0, LibreOffice 4.1.4, OpenSSL 1.0.1e, X.org 1.15.0, Mesa 9.2.5 e GCC 4.8.2.
Also worth mentioning, the next CentOS 7 updates will bring support for: HP Cloud, RackSpace, AWS, Google Compute, OpenStack, OpenNebula, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus.
Also, as soon as the migration tool will be available (it is still under testing), the users will be able to perform upgrades from CentOS 6.5 to CentOS 7. CentOS 7 is the first CentOS system to have such an upgrade tool.
For those who don’t know, CentOS was initially released as an independent RHEL clone, in 2004, but it got affiliated with Red Hat (and became Red Hat property) in January 2014. However, the CentOS developers are part of the Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team and don’t work together with the RHEL team.
Also, the most important third party repositories for CentOS and Scientific Linux are EPEL and Remi, RPMFusion. While the Remi and EPEL repositories are already available for CentOS 7 and Scientific Linux 7 (kind of, EPEL is available as beta), RPMFusion is not ready yet.
How to install the Remi Repository on 64 bit (x86_64) CentOS 7 and Scientific 7 :
To add the repository to your system, do this:
$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm
The Remi Repository is deactivated by default, so use the sed oneliner to enable it:
$ sudo sed -i 's/enabled=0/enabled=1/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo
How to install the EPEL Repository on 64 bit (x86_64) CentOS 7 and Scientific 7:
To add the repository to your system, do this:
$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm
Because it enables itself by default, no extra tweaks need to be done, for activating it.