3.1 Obtaining the CentOS Installation Media

The CentOS distribution can be downloaded from the CentOS Project website using the following URL:

https://www.centos.org/download/

The installation media is provided in the form of a DVD ISO image and is available in the following forms:

•CentOS Linux DVD ISO - Contains the installation image for the version of CentOS built from the RHEL 8 source code.

•CentOS Stream DVD ISO - Contains a continuously evolving version of CentOS that will eventually become the next versions of RHEL and CentOS.

For the purposes of this book, download the CentOS Linux DVD ISO image. The DVD ISO image is self-contained including all of the packages necessary to install a CentOS system and is named using the following convention:

CentOS-<version>-<architecture>-dvd.iso

For example, the CentOS 8 DVD image for 64-bit Intel systems is named as follows:

CentOS-8-x86_64-1905-dvd1.iso

Having downloaded the image, either burn it to disk or use the steps in the next section to write the media to a USB drive, configure your virtualization environment to treat it as a DVD drive or use the steps outlined later in this chapter to access the installation image over a network connection.