Karanbir recently announced the arrival of CentOS version 7. This is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 7, which is based on Fedora 19.
Unfortunately, this new version has some minor gotchas which we’d like to share in hopes it saves certain people some headaches.
Who uses 32-bit?
Apparently, 32-bit architectures are not cool anymore. For this reason, it is not possible to obtain an i386 build of CentOS 7. It might re-appear if enough people care, but so far we still can’t figure out who this affects. 仕方が無い.
What’s in a name?
Since we automate OS installations (amongst other things), it’s necessary to maintain standard naming conventions. We quickly noticed the CentOS 7.0 isos download directory isn’t named “major.minor” but just “major”. The iso filenames are also in CamelCase. Example:
CentOS 6.5: http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/CentOS/6.5/isos/x86_64/
CentOS 7: http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/
ISO: http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-NetInstall.iso
This is not such a big issue, but still noticeable by people who try to automate things.
Pane is dead
The only thing which prevented our kickstart installations from running was the zerombr option. In CentOS 7, this option takes no arguments, although in the past it was perfectly fine to use zerombr yes. This left us with a black screen and the error message “Pane is dead”. Simple fix which can be seen in our GitHub repo.
EPEL version changes
If you’re doing anything respectable, chances are you’re also using some packages from EPEL. One of the biggest pains with EPEL is the version numbers keep changing.
We found a simple solution on uhhh… stackoverflow… and we’ve decided to use this for our bootstrap scripts. It essentially allows you to script the installation of the EPEL repos, without knowing your CentOS version beforehand. Upvoted.
We support it
We anticipated the arrival of CentOS 7, so we’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for it in Jidoteki.
We’re preparing to launch Jidoteki soon, so make sure you sign up for early access and follow us on Twitter for more updates.