CentOS releases version 7.0 with ‘fundamental changes’

Developers behind the CentOS project released version 7.0 of the Linux distribution almost three years after the previous major release on Monday. They state that this release entails some ‘fundamental changes’ compared to previous versions.

This mainly concerns the implementation of the systemd daemon, the Gnome 3 desktop environment and the xfs filesystem. Other notable changes include the move to the Grub2 bootloader, the adoption of OpenJDK-7 as a Java Development Kit, and a revamped Linux kernel, with this release being the slightly outdated 3.10 version. In addition, CentOS 7.0 offers support for uefi according to the release notes.

Developers behind the project tested the new version three weeks before the final was released. The 64-bit DVD image of CentOS is available immediately, so so-called interest groups can now work on separate versions with, for example, OpenStack, Xen4 and Gluster.

CentOS, a free Linux distribution popular on servers, uses the source code of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro. The company behind the latter took over the CentOS project early this year. Since then, Red Hat has released three distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and CentOS. Like Fedora, CentOS has its own bug tracker and release cycle. Alternatives to CentOS are Scientific Linux and Oracle Linux.