CentOS 7.5 Officially Released and Available for Upgrade

A little over a month after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, CentOS Linux 7.5 (1804) is now generally available. Releases of CentOS, the free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, usually lag behind the releases of its enterprise counterpart, but are identical as far as package selection and day-to-day use and administration are concerned. CentOS, like RHEL, is highly regarded for its stability and its enterprise-readiness, and it fills in the gap between the stable but license-restricted releases of RHEL and the fast-paced releases of Fedora.

CentOS 7.5 is available as an easy in-place upgrade for existing systems and brings an updated kernel and dozens of updated packages. Since 7.5 is a minor release, upgrading an existing system is as easy as:

yum clean all && yum update

After updating, you’ll want to reboot to take advantage of the new kernel and to restart any services that have been modified. If you’re provisioning a new system, it’s a great time to go grab some updated installation media. If you’re upgrading an existing system, you can always check your CentOS or RHEL release version with cat /etc/system-release and your kernel version with uname -r.