We are pleased to announce the general availability of the latest version of CentOS Linux 8. Effectively immediately, this is the current release for CentOS Linux 8 and is tagged as 2111, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 Source Code.
**PLEASE NOTE:** CentOS Linux 8 will EOL on 31 December 2021. We will handle the EOL as directed by the CentOS Project Board of Directors and detailed here:
https://www.centos.org/centos-linux-eol/
As always, read through the Release Notes at:
http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS8.2111
- these notes contain important information about the release and details about some
of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from users.
Remember, you should not be using CentOS Linux 8 in production or you should have a plan to migrate to a different Operating System before 31 December 2021. We will only be doing updates as detailed in the above EOL link.
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Updates, Sources, and DebugInfos
Updates released since the upstream release are all posted, across all architectures. We strongly recommend every user apply all updates, including the content released today, on your existing CentOS Linux 8 machine by just running 'dnf update'.
As with all CentOS Linux 8 components, this release was built from sources hosted at git.centos.org. Sources will be available from vault.centos.org in their own dedicated directories to match the corresponding binary RPMs.
Since there is far less traffic to the CentOS source RPMs compared with the binary RPMs, we are not putting this content on the main mirror network. If users wish to mirror this content they can do so using the reposync command available in the yum/dnf-utils package. All CentOS source RPMs are signed with the same key used to sign their binary
counterparts. Developers and end users looking at inspecting and contributing patches to the CentOS Linux distro will find the code hosted at git.centos.org far simpler to work against. Details on how to best consume those are documented along with a quick start at:
http://wiki.centos.org/Sources
Debuginfo packages have been signed and pushed. Yum configs shipped in the new release file will have all the context required for debuginfo to be available on every CentOS Linux install.
This release supersedes all previously released content for CentOS Linux 8, and therefore we highly encourage all users to upgrade their machines. Information on different upgrade strategies and how to handle stale content is included in the Release Notes.
Note that older content, obsoleted by newer versions of the same applications are trim'd off from repos like extras/ and centosplus/
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Download
We produced the following installer images for CentOS Linux 8
# CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-boot.iso: 827326464 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-boot.iso) = 9602c69c52d93f51295c0199af395ca0edbe35e36506e32b8e749ce6c8f5b60a # CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-dvd1.iso: 10794041344 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-dvd1.iso) = 3b795863001461d4f670b0dedd02d25296b6d64683faceb8f2b60c53ac5ebb3e # CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-boot.iso: 789970944 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-boot.iso) = 1aab48198031ce8ea2fed9341fb9d28a5846bb1e25f0ffd480111a006fcdf374 # CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-dvd1.iso: 9282007040 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-dvd1.iso) = 11998564c8f5d18b765c7eace6c02e5891417388ba379cec0ce360af7cea7c7c # CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-boot.iso: 745474048 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-boot.iso) = ea75b9ab34f8fd636f8c32d5d7b56ede9c6a3b721cdf3057a15ab8927b996c60 # CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-dvd1.iso: 8215996416 bytes SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-dvd1.iso) = 146e58624ef3b8842fc9576d9c5b9c046497601b1a0636f934484b0b1929ce21
Information for the torrent files and sums are available at
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/isos/
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Getting Help
The CentOS ecosystem is sustained by community driven help and guidance. The best place to start for new users is at http://wiki.centos.org/GettingHelp
We are also on social media, you can find the project: on Twitter at :http://twitter.com/CentOS
on Facebook at :https://www.facebook.com/groups/centosproject/
on LinkedIn at :https://www.linkedin.com/groups/22405
And you will find the core team and a majority of the contributors on irc, on irc.libera.chat in #centos ; talking about the finer points of distribution engineering and platform enablement.
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Contributors
This release was made possible due to the hard work of many people, foremost on that list are the Red Hat Engineers for producing a great distribution and the CentOS QA team, without them CentOS Linux would look very different. Many of the team went further and beyond expectations to bring this release to you, and I would like to thank everyone for their help.
We are also looking for people to get involved with the QA process in CentOS, if you would like to join this please introduce yourself on the centos-devel list (http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel).
Finally, please join me in thanking the donors who all make this possible for us.
CentOS Linux 7 will be available and maintained until 2024 and CentOS
Stream 8 will also be maintained until that time. Here is how CentOS
Stream is different from CentOS Linux as and EOL information:
https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/
Here is how you can move a machine from CentOS Linux 8 to CentOS Stream 8:
https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
In closing, this release is very bittersweet for me. I have been involved in the CentOS Linux process and have done the vast majority of releases since the 2004. Moving forward, I will be working as hard as I can to make sure CentOS Stream is the best it can be.
It has been a wild ride, thanks for the memories.
Thanks,
Johnny Hughes