CentOS 8.2 (2004) Release: What's New and How to Upgrade?

CentOS is a free, community-supported Linux distribution that provides a computing platform compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The third iteration of CentOS 8 series, version 8.2 (2004) has been released superseding the previous CentOS 8.1 (1911). While CentOS 8.2 is rebased on the newest RHEL 8.2 source code, which makes it fully compatible with upstream RHEL 8.2 and also benefits from all the major changes.

Along with several improvements from RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2 now includes the latest versions of Python 3.8, GCC Toolset 9.1, and Maven 3.6, all developer tools.

What's new in CentOS 8.2 (2004) Release?

Besides acquiring several improvements from RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2 has added setools-console-analyses and setools-gui packages for analysis of SELinux-policy and data-flow inspections.

And some CentOS packages have been modified, including apache-commons-net, anaconda, basesystem, cloud-init, cfirefox, grub2, httpd, kernel, ockpit, dhcp, thunderbird, yum and PackageKit. It has also added extra packages that aren't part of upstream RHEL 8.2 and removed some packages as well.

Some of new packages included in CentOS 8.2 are as follows: centos-indexhtml, centos-logos, centos-obsolete-packages, centos-release, centos-backgrounds, elrepo-release and epel-release.

How to Upgrade to CentOS 8.2 (2004) Release?

For existing CentOS users, the upgrade to new CentOS 8.2 (2004) update can be initiated on your system if you run the command as follows:

sudo dnf update

But for new users, you can download the ISO images for CentOS 8.2 from the CentOS mirror repositories. And note that the images are available for three architectures: aarch64, ppc64le, x86_64. If you are a system administrator, you can easily customize system-wide cryptographic policies with the updated crypto-policies.