The latest update of CentOS, the free community edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has just been released, according to posts on the official CentOS blog. CentOS version 7 if the first iteration of the OS to be release since it brokered a deal with Red Hat earlier this year to work together more closely.

Not surprisingly, because CentOS-7 is built using RHEL’s source code, most of its features mirror those of Red Hat’s OS, the latest version of which was released back in June following a six month beta.

“CentOS conforms fully with Red Hat’s redistribution policy and aims to have full functional compatibility with the upstream product,” the release notes claim. “CentOS mainly changes packages to remove Red Hat’s branding and artwork.”

Just like RHEL 7, CentOS-7 runs on version 3.10.0 of the Linux kernel. XFS is now the default file system, and it comes with advanced support for Linux containers. In addition, it also incorporates the systemd management engine, the GRUB2 bootloader, and the firewalld dynamic firewall system, while the default Java Development Kit has been upgraded to OpenJDK-7. It also ships 3D graphics and OpenVMWare Tools out of the box.

Another similarity with RHEL 7 is that CentOS-7 is now offering an in-place upgrade path, which means that users will be able to migrate from the previous CentOS-6.5 without the need to reformat their systems – unfortunately, the tools to do so aren’t quite ready yet and will only be made available later, after testing.

The CentOS Project launched a new build process for this new release, wherein the entire distro was built from code hosted at its own Git repository. As a side-effect of the build cycle, source code packages (SRPMs) were created and are hosted on the main CentOS download servers together with their corresponding binary packages.

“We adopted a very open process,” said CentOS contributor Karanbir Singh in a mailing list post announcing the release. “The output of the entire buildsystem is made available, as it’s built, at http://buildlogs.centos.org/ – we hope to continue with that process for the life of CentOS-7, and attempt bringing CentOS-5 and CentOS-6 builds into the same system.”

CentOS-7 disc images, which includes separate builds for the KDE and Gnome desktops, a network-installable version and a live CD image, can be had from CentOS’s main download site or alternatively via BitTorrent.

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