The next major release from CentOS Stream is here, this successor of CentOS 8 will give us a glimpse of what lies ahead in RHEL 9 for users. Here are the links to download the CentOS 9 Stream ISO Images.
CentOS Stream is designed as a continuous delivery distribution to provide every single stable version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is because to make the Red Hat better and bug-free the company decided to repurpose CentOS as an upstream for its enterprise distribution. Which earlier was a downstream stable replica of RHEL and was popular among the server users because of the stability.
However, as per the announcement, the packages before including in the CentOS stream will go through several series of automated and manual tests and checks to ensure that the strict standards for inclusion in RHEL are met.
Also, the updates in the unreleased minor version of RHEL will be the same as the ones published in the Stream, in short, the main key of having CentOS stream by the company is to make RedHat more stable and robust.
Well, this rolling release system is based on Fedora 34 and forms the basis of the upcoming RHEL 9 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The latter has been in beta since the beginning of November.
Get CentOS 9 Stream ISO files
Red Hat itself and the CentOS community are involved in the development. ISOs are freely available for many architectures : 64-bit x86 (x86_64 v2 +) and ARM (AArch64) as well as IBM Z (s390x Z14 +) and Power (ppc64le POWER9 +). The system is intended for users willing to test, the provider does not offer any commercial support.
Therefore, if you are interested to download and start experiencing the new CentOS 9 Stream Linux distro on your Virtualbox or PC system, then here are the links to follow:
| Download CentOS 9 ISO file as per system Architecture | Repo Packages | Others CentOS 9 Images |
|---|---|---|
| x86_64 | RPMs | Cloud | Containers | |
| ARM64 (aarch64) | RPMs | Cloud | Containers | |
| IBM Power (ppc64le) | RPMs | Cloud | Containers | |
| IBM Z (s390x) | RPMs | Cloud | Containers | |
Well, for those who are on CentOS 8, RHEL will stop its LTS support and will move it to Stream completely. However, for those who are looking for RPM-based LTS (long-term version) supported Linux alternatives to CentOS 8; there are a couple of good options such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux. All these are well stable and one-to-one binary compatible with RedHat.
