CentOS 7 was released about a week ago, so I decided to give it a try. As you probably know, CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL). Typically, Red Hat put the new features in Fedora first. If things go well, they will move the new features to the RHEL, which eventually will be available in CentOS. In this new version, I see a lot of familiar features which I found in the last few release in Fedora, such as the new GNOME shell, new system service, Linux Kernel 3, etc. However, since RHEL/CentOS is target to enterprise users, who want nothing more than stability and reliably. They put a lot of effect to maintain the backward compatibility, such as /etc/rc.local, firewall etc. Personally, I really like these kind of extra care because it doesn’t break my existing settings.

CentOS 7 EPEL Repository Location

sudo rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-1.noarch.rpm

sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

And don’t forget to enable the new repository in the config file, i.e.,

sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

[remi]
....
enabled=1 ----------------- Set this to one
...

Notice that there are some common packages that were available in these repositories in CentOS 5/6, but missing in CentOS 7, such as hddtemp. So please don’t be surprised that your favorite packages are missing. However, you can always install all of these special packages from source.

–Derrick