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Migrate RHEL to CentOS

April 11th, 2006

For those of you interested in using CentOS instead of RHEL you don’t need to reinstall. By following these instructions you will convert an existing RHEL4 server over to CentOS 4:

I downloaded the following files from a CentOS mirror into an empty directory:

centos-release-4-2.1.i386.rpm
centos-yumconf-4-4.3.noarch.rpm
python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.i386.rpm
python-sqlite-1.1.6-1.i386.rpm
python-urlgrabber-2.9.6-2.noarch.rpm
RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
sqlite-3.2.2-1.i386.rpm
yum-2.4.0-1.centos4.noarch.rpm

Then ran:

rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
rpm -e –nodeps redhat-release
rpm -Uvh *.rpm

then

yum upgrade

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under Distributions.

5 Responses to “Migrate RHEL to CentOS”

  1. andreas1234567 Says:
    November 20th, 2006 at 1:50 pm

    I followed the procedure above and successfully converted my RHEL 4 system to CentOS. I skipped the centos-yumconf package, however, since I was unable to find it on the CentOS mirrors (is it obsolete?). Nevertheless, the system seems to work well.

    No more “your system needs to be entitled for updates blah-blah” from RHN up2date.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Andreas

    –

  2. derek Says:
    November 28th, 2006 at 4:51 pm

    I’ve had the same experience recently. It seems they have deprecated the centos-yumconf package.

  3. derek Says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    I just ran this again recently. Using CentOS 4.6 as the source of the RPMS I needed the following files:

    centos-release-4-4.4.i386.rpm
    python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
    python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
    python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
    RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
    sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
    yum-2.4.3-4.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
    yum-metadata-parser-1.0-8.el4.centos.i386.rpm

  4. rambo88 Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 3:09 am

    I ran it yesterday as well, I used
    centos-release-4-4.4.x86_64.rpm
    yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
    python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.x86_64.rpm
    python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.x86_64.rpm
    python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
    sqlite-3.3.6-2.x86_64.rpm

    and I used
    centos-yumconf-4-4.5.noarch.rpm

    I didn’t find this package in the i386 or x86_64 branches of the CentOS tree, but in the ia64 branch. For some reason it was still there even though this package is obsolete, probably the ia64 portion isn’t that up to date.

    I imported the GPG key while using “yum upgrade” - I was asked when it installed the first RPM.

    Everything still works well (RHEL4 ES Update 2 -> CentOS 4.5) - I even fixed the bugs I hoped (SCSI driver related).

  5. rambo88 Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 3:10 am

    centos-yumconf is still in the ia64 tree

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