Has Anyone Tried To Install CentOS 8.3 Yet??

[desertcat]

This seems to just get better and better -- NOT!! I first downloaded and then burned a copy of CentOS 8.3 to a Thumb Drive, figured out how to boot from it on 10+ year old hardware, installed it using a Classical Partition Scheme, booted it, and... It came up in CentOS Streams!!. I thought we had a YEAR to decide our fate? In spite of Choosing GNOME etc., ie a Server with a GUI -- I ended up with a minimal install. I might try to do a fresh install tomorrow morning -- OK later *this* morning -- but I'm wondering if anyone did an install of 8.3 and promptly got dumped into CentOS Streams.... That damn sure ain't CentOS 8.3!!

[nmusatti]

I believe there was an item in the release notes that mentioned that choosing "Server with a GUI" would result in a non working system. Given the problem I faced with different 8.3 isos, I ended up reinstalling my PC using the 8.2 netinstall iso. I chose "Gnome Workstation" and got a working, up to date 8.3 installation. I just hope the low quality of 8.3 install media isn't an indication that CentOS 8 support is already being reduced.

[TrevorH]

The grub menu saying "Stream" is apparently a bug, a cosmetic one. If you check to see if centos-linux-release and centos-stream-release are installed then you should only have the first one.

[desertcat]

The grub menu saying "Stream" is apparently a bug, a cosmetic one. If you check to see if centos-linux-release and centos-stream-release are installed then you should only have the first one.

Thanks TrevorH. Initially "The Plan" was to install it on jaguar to test and kick tires. Then I got some sub-optimal parts and threw them into ocelot -- my future workstation -- which is now up and running, but initially it would not boot -- some Hardware problem -- so my buddy took it home where he had a necessary cable I did not have, plugged it in, got into BIOS, made a few changes, so BIOS could find and my hardware, then had a grand ol' time playing. He installed CentOS 8.3 on it, did something and now GRUB lists CentOS 8.3 as the first bootable device, that said CentOS Streams are the next two items.

For those who may be wondering, 8.3 is very rough and unpolished but usable. I was able to install KDE 5.18 (I think), and tried to install Cinnamon, and a few other DEs but without luck. Grub Customizer is a no show, and there a lot of other things I have gone looking for that I have yet to find. CentOS 7.9 (on leopard) is still the purrfered DE to get things done on. I suspect that RHEL 8.4 and its forked clone will be a lot better.

D'Cat

[sml]

Grub Customizer is a no show, and there a lot of other things I have gone looking for that I have yet to find.

By now, I've amassed nearly 500 packages I rebuilt from Fedora sources because they were missing in EPEL8 (TBH, some of them have appeared in EPEL since then):

Code: Select all

$ ls /srv/rpms/Packages/*.rpm|wc -l
498

Grub Customizer is one of them.

I suspect that RHEL 8.4 and its forked clone will be a lot better.

Don't get your hopes up. It is the third point release already, and things still remain rough.

[desertcat]

Is Grub Customizer in EPEL8?? If so when I run dnf install grub-customizer it spits back "No match for argument: grub-customizer" Or is this one of those packages that you roll your own?? I have also gone looking for the DE Cinnamon, and the Music Player Amarok, and struck out on both. I did get KDE 5.18 installed but I was forced to jump through a LOT of hoops to do so.

As to Hopes... The only hopes I have is 8.4 will be a LOT better than 8.3... but by then it won't matter as we won't be here, though hopefully whatever fork in the road won't EXACTLY be a bug-for-bug copy of RHEL 8.4

D'Cat

[desertcat]

sml wrote: ↑
2021/01/11 05:35:42

desertcat wrote: ↑
2021/01/10 15:21:07
Grub Customizer is a no show, and there a lot of other things I have gone looking for that I have yet to find.

By now, I've amassed nearly 500 packages I rebuilt from Fedora sources because they were missing in EPEL8 (TBH, some of them have appeared in EPEL since then):

Code: Select all

 [Code: Select all]

$ ls /srv/rpms/Packages/*.rpm|wc -l
498

Grub Customizer is one of them.

desertcat wrote: ↑
2021/01/10 15:21:07
I suspect that RHEL 8.4 and its forked clone will be a lot better.

Don't get your hopes up. It is the third point release already, and things still remain rough.

Is Grub Customizer in EPEL8?? If so when I run dnf install grub-customizer it spits back "No match for argument: grub-customizer" Or is this one of those packages that you roll your own?? I have also gone looking for the DE Cinnamon, and the Music Player Amarok, and struck out on both. I did get KDE 5.18 installed but I was forced to jump through a LOT of hoops to do so.

As to Hopes hopefully it probably won't matter as we'll be long gone. The one hope is that the fork is not an EXACT bug-for-bug copy of RHEL 8.4 like CentOS is

[sml]

No, it's not in EPEL 8. I took the source RPM from Fedora and rebuilt it. It didn't require any adjustments. Uploaded here.

[desertcat]

No, it's not in EPEL 8. I took the source RPM from Fedora and rebuilt it. It didn't require any adjustments. Uploaded here.

Thanks. New task added to my "To Do" List.

Have not found anything on the Amarok music player, or Cinnamon D.E. I'm sure I'll find others. Packages that I currently use is CentOS 7.9 on a regular basis can be found and installed but only after you have the Secret De-Coder Ring to make them visible, or simply are not there -- half the time I'm not sure which is which. Red Hat could have made the process so much easier.

D'Cat

[sml]

Amarok 2.9.0 currently in Fedora Rawhide still depends on KDELibs 4 and Qt 4. AFAIK there are no plans to bring them to EPEL 8. So, in order for Amarok to land in EPEL 8, three things must happen: 1) Amarok devs publish a new, Qt 5 version (or at least tag it in git); 2) Fedora devs package it for Rawhide; and 3) EPEL devs backport it to EL8. Each of the two latter steps could take anywhere from several weeks to several months. As to the first one, it took Amarok devs 2.5 years to get from Amarok 2.9 Beta to 2.9.0. And citing their mailing list this past December:

Development has pretty much ended over last 5-10 years. You may see a response from one of the general kde developers who pokes at amarok, but there's not really anyone actively developing/managing the project at this point, unless something has changed that I'm unaware of.

Meanwhile, it should be already possible to build Amarok against Qt 5 from the git head. And Clementine is available both as a Flatpak and from the Raven repo. Raven also has an older version of Strawberry.

As to Cinnamon, it is a big and complex software suite. Just as a reminder, it took almost a year to get KF5 into EPEL 8. OTOH, request for LXQt was filed over a year ago, and it's still not in EPEL 8. It's now provided by Raven though.

There are several reasons why EPEL 8 is so slow going. One is the Modularity which complicates things quite a bit. My ~/.config/mock/epel-8-x86_64.cfg is full of comments like this:

Code: Select all

# I'm sick of Fedora Modularity. pdfbox needs mvn(javax.xml.bind:jaxb-api)
# So where is it? javapackages-tools? Nope! maven? Nope! ant? Nope!
# It's in pki-deps, duh! So, now I enable pki-deps and all is fine and dandy?
# Nope! The versions from pki-deps conflict with those in javapackages-tools.
# And no, pki-deps doesn't have profiles to choose from, its either all or
# nothing.
#config_opts['module_enable'] = ['pki-deps']
# Ended up rebuilding glassfish-jaxb-api from Fedora

Another reason is that many *-devel and compat-* packages were dropped by Red Hat from RHEL 8.