A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at Red Hat Summit I learned that, while running CentOS 7, suspend worked on that netbook. However, it was already pretty old by the time I put it on the netbook and it was missing certain libraries and had old versions of libraries like Go so I couldn’t do something like install Weechat-Matrix on there.

Now that CentOS 8 has been out for a while (I think part of the delay came from setting up CentOS 8-Stream, I decided to put CentOS 8 on my netbook. There isn’t any supported upgrade path (unlike Fedora), which is a bummer. However, this netbook is just used for light travel and as a backup at conferences in case my main laptop doesn’t work. So I didn’t mind blowing it away.

When I put in the USB stick with the install ISO, everything worked fine. However, from the minimal install, it did not install NetworkManager-wifi (which it probably would have done with the Desktop/Laptop install, but I really didn’t want to have any more packages than I needed). So if you find yourself installing CentOS 8 on a laptop where the WiFi works during the installation, but not after installation, you just need to plug in an ethernet cable and install NetworkManager-wifi. After a reboot, everything worked perfectly, network-wise. I was also pleased to see nmtui installed as I prefer it to nmcli most of the time. Usually it’s the first thing I install on a CentOs install.

On the unfortunate side, although there are EPEL packages for CentOS 7 for weechat and i3 (the window manager), they don’t exist for CentOS 8. Perhaps it’s a matter of time or perhaps someone needs to step up to make those packages.

OK, that’s it for now. I’ll report back if there’s anything astonishingly great or bad about running CentOS 8 on my netbook.