We all know CentOS – Community Enterprise Operating System as a linux distribution aiming at enterprise class community-supported computing platform.

CentOS aims to be 100% compatible with it’s upstream source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS 7 was released on 7 th of July 2014 (RHEL 7 on 10th of June 2014) and its brings some major differences from it’s predecessor CentOS 6.

Only emphasising some of the big ones:

• Kernel 3.10.0
• Systemd
• Firewalld
• Grub2
• XFS filesystem
• MariaDB
• Apache 2.4
• …

So overall there is a quite significant difference first time running CentOS 7. What i noticed first was a quite fast boot time – faster than with CentOS 6. Next to mention is the change to systemd – this is quite a change from administration system point of view. No more “/etc/init.d/sshd start” commands but instead using “systemctl start sshd“!

Ifconfig is also gone so we all need to start using “ip addr list” and Grub2 is here so learn how to use it – mostly how to manually boot your system with Grub2 in case you ever need it! Finally Apache version from official repositories is 2.4.6 and MySQL Server is ditched from official repos – instead you can find MariaDB.

Let’s Install CentOS 7!

1. Download CentOS 7 ISO

CentOS 7 ISO is available for download HERE.

2. Boot CentOS 7 ISO

Since we will be installing CentOS 7 on a virtual machine we have created a new VM and loaded CentOS 7 ISO.

3. Choose Installation Language

Please choose the installation language in this step.

4. Installation Summary

Here is a summary of everything needed to configure in order to start installing CentOS 7 on your system.

5. Date and Time

Please configure the date and time of your operating system.

6. Keyboard Layout

Please select your keyboard layout.

7. Installation Source

Choose the installation source – usually CD/DVD ROM.

8. Software Selection

Choose the software you want to install.

9. Installation Destination (Partitioning 1)

Please choose the disk you want to install operating system on. Also check the box “I will configure partitioning” to manually partition the disk.

10. Manual Partitioning (Partitioning 2 & 3)

Configure partitions as desired and write changes to disk.

11. Network & Hostname

Configure networking and hostname.

12. Begin Installation

Finally start the CentOS 7 installation.

13. User Settings

There aretwo more things to configure… Choose the root password and create a user if needed.

14. Installation Completed

When the CentOS 7 installation has completed click the “Reboot” button.

15. Login Prompt

After a reboot you will be welcomed by a CentOS 7 login prompt. Enter the username and password you configured in Step 13.

Overall the CentOS 7 made one more step towards Fedora – wether we like it or not!