Welcome back to AWIPS Tips!
The AWIPS software was originally developed to run on the RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. RHEL is not free to use, and because of that NSF Unidata has historically used CentOS as our RHEL operating system of choice.
As many of you might know, CentOS7 is the operating system that is currently supported with our production version of AWIPS (v20.3.2). Currently, we offer installations of CAVE on multiple operating systems including CentOS7, MacOS, and Windows, but EDEX is only supported on CentOS7. However, the end of life (EOL) for CentOS7 (and RHEL7) is quickly approaching, with the official end date of June 30th, 2024.
To address this issue, the NSF Unidata AWIPS Team is hard at work developing a new release of AWIPS for version 23.4.1, which migrates to RHEL version 8. Because CentOS is no longer supported beyond version 7, we will be making a transition to a new operating system: Rocky Linux. Our next release of AWIPS, v23.4.1 will be released on the Rocky Linux 8 Operating System, which has an EOL of May 31, 2029.
We are hoping to release a beta version of v23.4.1 very soon, followed by a production release prior to the CentOS7 EOL. Please know that this development is our top priority, so if we are not able to address something in the current v20.3.2 release, it is because we are focusing our efforts on putting out v23.4.1 in a timely manner.
Thank you for your support and continued use of AWIPS!
Check back in two weeks for the next blog post, where we discuss the current functionality of the Text Workstation in CAVE!
To view archived blogs, visit the AWIPS Tips blog tag, and get notified of the latest updates from the AWIPS team by signing up for the AWIPS mailing list. Questions or suggestions for the team on future topics? Let us know at support-awips@unidata.ucar.edu
