CentOS

CentOS used to be the free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, released after RHEL and tracking it. That project, CentOS Linux, ended. What carries the name now is CentOS Stream, which sits the other way round: it is what the next minor release of RHEL is built from, so it moves ahead of RHEL rather than behind it.

Install it from the panel ​

In the client area, open your server, then Reinstall the server. Pick the CentOS tile, open its version list and choose the one you want, then fill in the partitioning, the software RAID, the hostname and the password below the grid. The form itself is described in reinstalling your OS.

Read this before picking it ​

CentOS Linux 8 reached end of life at the end of 2021. It receives no security updates. A machine installed from that version and left on the internet is carrying known, unpatched holes, and no amount of dnf upgrade will fix it, because there is nothing left to pull.

If you want a free, RHEL-compatible base with a long support window, install AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux instead. They are what CentOS Linux used to be, and everything written for RHEL applies to them unchanged.

When CentOS Stream is the right pick ​

Stream is a reasonable choice for exactly one thing: testing your software against what RHEL is about to become. If you ship RPMs to customers running RHEL, building and testing on Stream tells you about a breakage before their minor upgrade does.

It is a rolling target inside a major version, which is the opposite of what you want under a production workload you are not watching.

The commands are the family's ​

dnf, firewalld, SELinux and nmcli behave as described on AlmaLinux.

cat /etc/centos-release
dnf upgrade --refresh

Where to go next ​

• First connection: your own user, SSH keys, password logins off.
• IP addresses: configuring the additional addresses on the fresh system.
• The console: watching the install, and getting in when the network does not answer.