Live migration of a RedHat Enteprise Linux 8.0 to Centos 8.0

RHEL 8 to CentOS 8 migration guide.

If you tried a RHEL 8 Beta or you have a Developer’s License of RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 and you want / need to migrate to CentOS 8 for any reason (licensing, cost, hobby, fun) without loosing any data you can do it like this:

 

Importing CentOS 8 Keys

First of all you need to download, rename and import the CentOS 8 key or yum will fail like this:

Run this commands:

 

Change Repositories from Redhat’s to CentOS

Disable the subscription manager repo of Redhat:

 

Create or Download CentOS repos:

You need:

CentOS-AppStream.repo CentOS-Base.repo CentOS-Extras.repo CentOS-PowerTools.repo inside /etc/yum.repos.d/

You can create them copying them from here:

 

 

 

 

Now you have no redhat repos and only CentOS 8 repos in your system. Clean yum:

And try an update:

 

It should reinstall every package from the CentOS 8 Repositories.

 

If it does not, try to create a rpmlist of all installed packages and xargs it to reinstall manually:

 

 

 

If you succeed you should see yum loading only CentOS Repos when issuing a yum install / reinstall like this:

 

 

You can also uninstall subscription manager now:

 

 

Don’t forger to grub2-mkconfig !

On RHEL the path is:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg

You need to use /centos/ like this: