CentOS 4.3 Multi-Platform Release

hughesjr writes "The CentOS development team has announced the availability of CentOS-4.3 for the i386, x86_64, and ia64 architectures. Major changes in this version of CentOS include: upgraded update system - this new system provides more that 100 total mirrors for updates and picks geographically close and non-stale mirrors based on our master server's content; Frysk, InfiniBand Architecture (IBA), and z/VM hypervisor added; see the release announcement for more information. ISO's are also available for download on their site."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:CentOS?

[donutz]

Are they related to Microsoft ENTerprise Operating System?

No, CentOS is actually a totally free equivalent of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for people who don't have the money [linuxplanet.com] to spend on an RHEL license).

Re:Hmmm

[RagingFuryBlack]

From my personal experience, a stable CentOS release is great for a Cpanel/WHM server environment. Its relatively easy to setup and has been pretty much problem free for me.

Re:Does This Mean A Fork?

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

They really have to roll their own update system, because RHEL's isn't really suited for a free product.

Re:A clone of RHEL

[spevack]

Mod parent down.

In one sentence, it states that CentOS uses the "source packages published by Red Hat", and in the next sentence it says that RHEL is "distributed only in uncool binary form".

The source code to RHEL is fully available.

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/4 /en/os/i386/SRPMS/ [redhat.com]

Upgrade

[zerocool^]

Untested, but in theory you should be able to upgrade from 4.2 via:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/CentOS/4.3/os/i386/Cen tOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-3.2.i386.rpm [vt.edu]

rpm -y upgrade

reboot

Don't blame me. Should work, no guarantees.

~Will

Re:kinda lame

[tdeuces]

"At least add something of value..."

Untrue. CentOS has released versions for the SPARC and Alpha processors that are not available from Red Hat. This definitely adds value for people running those platforms.

Re:Wow, that was quick!

[LnxAddct]

You dumbass, the entire 2.6 scheduler, virtual memory manager, and auditing subsystem are all written and maintained by Red Hat. Let us not forget the countless other contributions they make to the kernel and the development of one of the most often used filesystems, ext3 (its not the fastest, but it is one of the most feature filled and stable). The majority of GCC is also maintained and/or coded by them. They didn't like using a proprietary virtual machine so they started GCJ too, a native compiler for java. Shall we start about how they pay the salary of Chris Blizzard, the big firefox developer and mozilla board member, or Alan Cox, one of the most important kernel developers alive. Red Hat has contributed more code to linux and OSS in general than any other entity, and they don't even brag about it. They also do the majority of the development for Gnome (even the Gnome.org site is hosted by them, read the bottom of the site). Red Hat has spent millions making sure that Linux stays competitive, they bought GFS and Logical Volume Managing from Sistina and gave it away for free, the bought eCos and Cygwin, gave them away for free, spent a few million on the Netscape Directory Server and gave it away for free, and I could go on for much longer. You really have no idea how important Red Hat is to the OSS movement, if something ever happens to them we'll all be set back years as far as development pace goes. Even a good chunk of GLibc is written by them. Unlike most distributions, Red Hat actually codes a good portion of that which they sell, they aren't just repackaging other people's work in an easy to use fashion, they are responsible for where the movement is today. (They also gave 12 million dollars worth of stock to Linus Torvalds to show appreciation for what he's done, thats why Linus never has to worry about work, owns a big home, and drives 3 cars, a Mercedes SLK32, a BMW convertible, and an Acura SUV) Get your facts straight.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Wow, that was quick!

[LnxAddct]

Red Hat is fine with them doing this, infact a few Red Hat engineers help them out everynow and then if they can't get something working right. Seriously, Red Hat is a way cooler corpoartion than the slashdot groupthink would have you believe.
Regards,
Steve

Re:kinda lame

[hughesjr]

ummm ... there is PLENTY of added vaule (someone else mentioned the SPARC and ALPHA arches) ... there is also an installable i586 version of the kernel adding support for pentium, VIA c3 processors, etc. That is not upstream. PPC32 that works in CentOS ... not upstream.

There is a CentOS Extras repo and CentOS Plus repo that produce packages that are not upstream ... and work with both CentOS and RHEL.

CentOS submits MANY bugfixes and patches to Red Hat code back upstream.

There are also many other things out there based on CentOS as their core OS ... anyone heard of Asterisk@home, SME Server, openfiler, Rocks Clusters ... plenty more:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?story topic=11 [centos.org]

Re:Not important news? What are you smoking?

[massysett]

Yes, I have heard that people who are studying for Red Hat certification need distros like Centos. Of course you want to play around with RHEL and study it, and of course RHEL is too expensive for that. From what I've read Fedora doesn't cut it for this purpose either.

Re:Upgrade

[caseih]

Actually upgrading is completely automatic. A yum update from today should do it. My installations of CentOS have automatically upgraded themselves from 4.0 all the way to this release.

Just to verify, I ran yum update on one machine that doesn't auto update and it's upgrading to 4.3 all by itself. (no need to install centos-release)

I use RHEL4 and CentOS interchangably. They are 100% compatible (binary package-wise). I have switched machines back and forth on the fly. I must say, though, CentOS needs to get a graphics designer to tweak things. Their gdm and gnome login screens are hideous. Even their grub background is awful.

Re:Centos-Half good Half bad

[beheaderaswp]

It appears I'm replying to someone who has never run CentOS...

Redhat's Up To Date is GPL'd and in the distro. Along with Yum. Both work great.

Re:Not important news? What are you smoking?

[jimmyharris]

RedHat EL was unfortunately priced outside of our budget (we're in academia), yet some scientific software vendors only *offically* support the Redhat series.

Either you didn't stumble across Red Hat's academic pricing, or your budget is really small. I work at an Australian University and we pay US$50 per year for each RHEL AS license.

While I also use CentOS on some servers, it's more for Yum (non-RHN) and licensing convenience than price.

Re:Wow, that was quick!

[Ginger Unicorn]

Leveraging code as a product is absolutely not the point of OSS. RedHat's business model isn't built on developing code and selling copies of it at a profit. It's built on service contracts to maintain, enhance and support that code. RedHat's codebase is built on GPL code other people made, with alterations and enhancements RedHat have built on top. In return for using other people's code, they have to let everyone else use theirs.

Since they arent relying on productising their code, this doesnt hurt their bottom line, because people buy RedHat licences to enable and benefit from RedHat's constant improvements, not just to be allowed to install a copy on their computer.

Re:Please stop using 386.

[hughesjr]

ummm ... the arch is i386 ... most of the packages are compiled in i386 mode (specifically: -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=pentium4)

The exceptions are the kernel, ssh, glibc.

The correct arch is i386