14 DAY TRIAL // If you plan on building ARM devices powered by a Linux kernel-based operating system, then you should know that the excellent CentOS distribution is now available for download for ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architectures.
One of our readers has recently informed us that there is an official image of the latest version of the CentOS 7 Linux operating system available for download on the main centos.org servers. CentOS is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The compressed disk image of CentOS 7 for the AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architecture has been designed primarily for ARM enthusiasts and hardware vendors interested in porting their platform to the open-source CentOS Linux operating system.
The disk image (IMG) of the latest CentOS 7 build is now available for download as a compressed file in the XZ format. When uncompressed, the image has approximately 12 GB in size, despite the fact that archived it only weights 320 MB.
Here's what you need to know to get started
If you're planning on using this CentOS 7 image for porting, you should be aware of a few things. For example, the default password for the root account is 'centos.' Additionally, you must know that suitable boot information must be added to a UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) entry after using the IMG file.
To burn the IMG file to disk, you can just use the dd command. The CentOS developers are recommending using the command below to ensure a proper writing of the image to disk, so just make sure that you change the target device and the name of the image with the respective values for your environment.