CentOS Release Manager, Karanbir Singh announced the release of CentOS Linux 7 1804, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.5.

CentOS is a community-maintained clone of RHEL, and it is targeted at users who want the functionality of RHEL without the need for Red Hat support. As a result, CentOS is extremely popular among web hosting providers that need thousands of virtual machine to run websites.

As CentOS emerged as a serious threat to RHEL, Red Hat moved swiftly to acquire the project. Many CentOS maintainers joined Red Hat. Since then, CentOS has maintained a measure of independence and continues to be available for free of cost.

Although CentOS is seen as downstream of RHEL, in some cases it also works as an upstream source. “ Developers and end users looking at inspecting and contributing patches to the CentOS Linux distro will find the code hosted at git.centos.org far simpler to work against,” wrote Singh.

Users are urged to upgrade to the latest version of CentOS. “This release supersedes all previously released content for CentOS Linux 7, and therefore we highly encourage all users to upgrade their machines. Information on different upgrade strategies and how to handle stale content is included in the Release Notes,” said Singh.

The system upgrade can be performed with these commands:

$ sudo yum clean all

$ sudo yum upgrade

$ sudo systemctl reboot

Download CentOS at the official download page.