Post

Avoid CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 for now

I’ve been looking at the latest release of RedHat Enterprise 7 and its ‘clone’ CentOS 7 recently.

Sum it up in a single word? DAFUQ? (is that technically one word?).

If you currently run EL6, for $diety’s sake, stay on it. There are so many problems at the moment that you are much better to stay well clear until the dust settles.

List of current issues:

  1. rsyslog - no longer works. Everything is now in a 'journal'
  2. logwatch - no longer works. Does not support journal logs
  3. gnome3 - If you use a desktop, you're pretty much forced to use Gnome 3
  4. systemd - requires all kinds of hacks and workarounds to get anything more than basic functionality
  5. systemd - Service files missing from a lot of tasks (eg: BZ 1060347)
  6. up to 50% speed reduction in virtual machines - BZ1104748
  7. No thunderbird packages available as yet.
  8. No Xen Dom0 support in EL7 - despite the upstream kernel version supporting it
  9. Wholesale shipping of packages out to EPEL to avoid support requirements

This is just scratching the surface at the moment… There are many more gotchas just waiting to bite.

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