Installation of CentOS 8 on RaspberryPi 4 B

Prerequisite

• RaspberryPi 4
  • I hope, I don't need to explain this
• micro SD Card
  • RaspberryPi 4 uses micro SD card as main storage
• SD Card writer
  • You'll need this to Flash CentOS image to the SD card
• HMDI to micro cable
  • RaspberryPi4 uses micro HDMI port for HDMI output. You'll need to see the screen of RaspberryPi4 until you finish step in this blog to connect to you RaspberryPi via ssh over the network.
• USB pluggable keyboard
  • You'll need a keyboard plugged in you RaspberryPi to type commands for the first boot configuration.

Download centOS 8

First you will need to download CentOS 8 for Raspberry Pi. You can find the image from:

https://people.centos.org/pgreco/CentOS-Userland-8-stream-aarch64-RaspberryPI-Minimal-4/

Use this command to extract the xz file in Mac.

brew install xz xz -d filename.xz

Flash to a SD card

The next step is to flash the OS to a SD card.

Thanks to Etcher you don't have to use command line interface for flashing SD card.

Download Etcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

And flash the CentOS 8 image to a SD card using Etcher. The UI is pretty straightforward.

First boot

Slide the SD card in to your RaspberryPi and plug USB-C for the power and micro HDMI for display.

First login

If everything went well, you'll see the prompt asking you the login user and password.

Use this default account for your first boot.

• localhost login: root
• password: centos

Let's change the password

passwd

Configure WiFi

Let's configure WiFi connection so that you can ssh into your RaspberryPi from your laptop.

I used nmcli command that comes with CentOS 8 for setting up wireless connection.

• List all the network devices

nmcli d

• Make sure wifi is turned on

nmcli r wifi on

• List WiFi networks

nmcli d wifi list

• Connect to a WiFi network

nmcli d wifi connect <network name> password <password>

• Make sure the connection is established

nmcli d

• Check the IP address

ifconfig

Add user

Let's add a user for better safety and avoid using root

$ useradd <username> 
$ passwd <username> 
$ usermod -aG wheel <username>

The last command adds your new account to wheel group that grants the account a special privileges, so you can skip it for normal users.

SSH

Everything should be ready for remote ssh connection now.

Test it if you can connect to your RaspberryPi via SSH over the network.

ssh<username>@<ip_address>

Expand root file system

rootfs-expand

References

• http://reallyappreciate.com/raspberry-pi-4-8gb-model-with-centos-8/
• https://core.docs.ubuntu.com/en/stacks/network/network-manager/docs/configure-wifi-connections