Time for a ISO respin?

,

NethServer Version: 7.9.2009

I’ve read only few hiccups installing NethServer on fresh hardware. I know, should knock to CentOS for a better knowledge of supported hardware (and business/enterprise hardware is often better supported than custom/home).
But.

Worthwile to consider a respin of the ISO with updated packages?
Redhat stated

RHEL 7.9 is the final RHEL 7 release
(source)

but sometimes at least less seasoned kernel might be useful.

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Unfortunately CentOS doesn’t provide updated ISOs AFAIK. Respinning seems not trivial.

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Viewing the like put by @giacomo i can see that the developers have seen the problem already.
But.

A NethServer competitor, ClearOS7, is providing a “ready to install” image coooked in may
https://mirror1-amsterdam.clearos.com/clearos/7/iso/x86_64/
And provide some daily build.

So… Not asking something like that, but 'till the end of June 2023 is still… more than 2 years.
I’m expecting that not all the “new devices” will receive support from kernel 3.10 nor a fresher kernel (4.14 has EOL at January 2024, 3.10 is EOL since November 2017) for the distro. But the problem will hit the fan.
Sooner or later.

Maybe this kind of task is “not on schedule™” or “not on the list™” (AKA not interested/not willing to/too much time/not enough urgent, pick your kind, not change the outcome) due to full immersion into Neth8. I respect that.
But I’m asking: how many persons won’t adopt NethServer because it does not recognize chipsets, storage, NICs and won’t get the hassle of ESXi, XEN, Proxmox or ask into community in the next 30 months?

A wonderful thing is already done from the setup procedure: it’s quite a long time than i install NethServer 7.x and at list since 7.9 on of the “last” steps of anaconda is… kernel update, if I’m not wrong.

As far as i can see into the iso, there are two copies of initrd.img dated 23/10/2020. Maybe for having at least a less stale kernel… might be necessary update only these files?

The NS ISO is just a CentOS one with:

  • extra packages (NS dependencies)
  • some kickstart files to ease the installation

The code is here.

The hardware support depends on the running kernel of the ISO itself, we do not modify that part in any way.
If some hardware is not support out-of-the box, and the machine is certified for RHEL 7, the vendor usually gives a driver disk which can be loaded using the CentOS standard installation path.

If CentOS will ship a new ISO, we will follow them.

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Thanks anyway for your time, giacomo. :slight_smile:

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Recently we’ve seen some people with unsupported CPUs/or integrated graphics.

FWIW, from the link on first post:

New functionality and new hardware enablement are not planned for availability in the Maintenance Support (RHEL 8) Phase and Maintenance Support 2 (RHEL 6, 7) Phase. Minor releases with updated installation images may be made available in this Phase.