What is CentOS

CentOS is an acronym for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it is a 100% rebuild of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). While RHEL costs money, CentOS offered as a free community-supported enterprise Linux distro. Users who are good at Linux and don’t want to invest money on RedHat support fees is always selected CentOS. This will save money and enterprise class software. However, the free ride is over. Centos Linux 8 EOL at December 31, 2021.

Centos Stream

CentOS stream seats between Fedora and RHEL. In other words, CentOS Stream is a rolling-release distro for RHEL. It acts as a gateway between Fedora and RHEL. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8. It has regular updates like Centos8.

This article describes, how to change Centos Repositories to Centos Stream repositories.

Backup your Data

Its advised to take the backup of all your necessary data.

Check the current CentOS release

Ensure the current release is CentOS 8 by typing the following command.

cat /etc/centos-release

The result will look like this:

Install Stream repos

sudo rpm -ivh https://vault.centos.org/centos/8/extras/x86_64/os/Packages/centos-release-stream-8.1-1.1911.0.7.el8.x86_64.rpm

Disable Centos-Linux repos

sudo sed -i 's|enabled=1|enabled=0|g'  /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-*

Disable Media repo of Centos Stream

sudo sed -i 's|enabled=1|enabled=0|g'  /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Stream-Media.repo

Clean

sudo dnf clean all

Install Centos release stream

sudo dnf install centos-release-stream -y --allowerasing

After successfully installation, the result will look like this:

Swap repo

sudo dnf swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos -y

Sync

sudo dnf distro-sync -y

Check CentOS 8 stream release

Verify the current version is CentOS 8 stream by typing the following command.

cat /etc/centos-release

The result will look like this: