I’ve been meaning to write an article on how to switch from CentOS to Oracle Linux for a while since Red Hat owned by IBM announced its for CentOS, I’ve found myself with a bit of spare time over the weekend so finally got around to documenting the steps required to migrate from CentOS to Oracle Linux. new direction What is CentOS? CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) was a Linux a distribution that provided a free, community-supported computing platform functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In January 2014, CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL under a new CentOS governing board. The first CentOS release in May 2004, numbered CentOS version 2, was forked from RHEL version 2.1AS with the most the recent version being CentOS 8 released on 24 September 2019. Why Switch? In December last year, Red Hat announced that the availability of CentOS undermines the commercial side of its business with CentOS and became CentOS Stream, which is is a development preview of what is soon to come in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, focused on the next minor release. Fedora, another distribution maintained by Red Hat, is further ahead and more experimental than what CentOS will become. In the past, CentOS has been a community build of the current RHEL source, providing a robust production distro for those willing to do without Red Hat support. When RHEL gets a fix, the project aims to have the same fix available for CentOS “within 72 hours” of its release, while new point releases of CentOS come “four to eight weeks after the release by upstream.” In other words, CentOS tracked RHEL. But with this new update, the direction changes making CentOS a more experimental OS rather than the stable distro capable of production workloads. Oracle Linux Not Oracle, you say, why move away from one corporate overload (IBM owns Red Hat) and jump in the pan with another (Oracle)? Oracle Linux, much like what CentOS does, tracks the RHEL base release and bar. Oracles Unbreakable Kernal is pretty much a direct clone of Red Hat with some Oracle branding slapped over the Red Hat stuff. Oracle previously posted about it and to alleviate some concerns provides an . here FAQ Switching from CentOS to Oracle Linux Switching from CentOS to Oracle Linux couldn’t be easier, Oracle provides a lovely shell script to do all the hard work for you, you can get it from their . GitHub Let’s demo the process below. I’ve used a CentOS 7 Vagrant host to perform the process which you can manually download yourself or if you are already using Vargant just follow the steps below. I’ve written about Vagrant before if you are . here interested Let's get the vagrant CentOS 7 vagrant file and start the machine: vagrant init centos/ vagrant up 7 With CentOS 7 installed let's install git and ensure all the packages are up-to-date: [vagrant@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS Linux release (Core) 7.9 .2009 sudo yum install git sudo yum update && sudo yum upgrade -yum Get Oracle’s script to swap the OS from CentOS to Oracle Linux: git clone https: //github.com/oracle/centos2ol.git Run the centos2ol.sh script: [root@localhost centos2ol]# ls centos2ol.sh CONTRIBUTING.md LICENSE.txt README.md SECURITY.md [root@localhost centos2ol]# ./centos2ol.sh It doesn't take long at all to do the changes, my example took about 5 minutes to run. Below I have posted an extract of the logs: [root@localhost centos2ol]# ./centos2ol.sh Checking required packages... Checking your distribution... package epel-release is not installed Checking yum lock... Checking required python packages... Finding your repository directory... Learning which repositories are enabled... Repositories enabled before update include: base extras updates ... ... Looking yumdownloader... Backing up and removing old repository files... Removing CentOS-specific yum configuration /etc/yum.conf Downloading Oracle Linux release package... Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds cached hostfile ... ... ... done Removing yum cache Switch complete. Oracle recommends rebooting system. for for for for from from this After a reboot of the host, we see we have successfully moved from CentOS to Oracle Linux: [vagrant@localhost ~]$ uptime : : up min, user, load average: , , [vagrant@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release RedHat Enterprise Linux Server release (Maipo) [vagrant@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/oracle-release Oracle Linux Server release 12 31 05 0 1 1.17 0.42 0.15 7.9 7.9 Other Options Another option is to wait on Rocky Linux, after the news broke Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project who had been out of the scene for a few years would return and create with the goal of building a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100 percent bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is great news but it’s likely to be a year or two away at the earliest, you can help out with Rocky Linux and track updates on their website . Rocky Linux here OS made a similar announcement as well that it would also work on making a CentOS/Red Hat clone called . Both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are still developing their respective operating systems but Alma already has a working Beta which you can check out . Cloud Linux AlmaLinux here Conclusions Whether you like Oracle or not they have provided a viable way to move from CentOS to Oracle Linux as Red Hat starts to utilize CentOS for experimental features. Do you really want production hosts running on such a distro? Previously published here .
