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."

Nice; whonder if they'll support Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great update, but I wonder if they'll ever put forth the effort to port it on over to the new Intel-Mac hardware... I know this will probably weigh-in on Redhat supporting it with RHEL, but it's a nice pipe dream. The Fedora Core project supports the PPC platform, so you never know.

Also, before I get flamed, the reason why I'm interested in CentOS / RHEL for Intel-Mac is because that is what I am expected to develop and test on at work -- it would be sweet to have this all in my new MacBook Pro -- plain and simple.

Re:CentOS?

[Inner_Child]

I was under the impression that when you buy a RHEL license, you're paying for the support, not the OS. Anyone care to correct me?

Re:Not important news? What are you smoking?

[jludwig]

Agreed. We've now deployed Centos 4.2 with Warewulf on three Beowulf clusters, two of which I directly administer. RedHat EL was unfortunately priced outside of our budget (we're in academia), yet some scientific software vendors only *offically* support the Redhat series. For this type of situation, CentOS fits the bill nicely, not to mention there exists good VNFS scripts for warewulf already. Its a valuable resource filling the hole that Redhat Linux left.

Jeff

Please stop using 386.

[ArcherB]

From the CentOS about page [centos.org]:
CentOS-4 supports x86 (i586 and i686),

In other words, it won't run in a 386, I wouldn't want it if it was compiled so low as to be optimized for a 386. Please start using x86 something other than 386.

However, even the CentOS page is guilty (from another page on CentOS's site: [centos.org]
i386 - This distribution supports AMD (K6, K7, Thunderbird, Athlon, Athlon XP, Sempron), Pentium (Classic, Pro, II, III, 4, Celeron, M, Xeon), VIA (C3, Eden, Luke, C7) processors.

(Sorry, it just irks me)

Re:Wow, that was quick!

[ahodgson]

People using CentOS may, undermine some of RedHat's business. However, they also help maintain a vibrant RedHat-based server ecosystem that encourages third-party packagers (like Dag, etc.) to support RHEL distributions, indirectly making RHEL much more usable.

Most people who use CentOS _like_ RedHat, they just don't want to pay RedHat for support they will never need. If they didn't have something like CentOS, they'd probably use Debian or some other free distro. They almost certainly would not pay RedHat support fees in any case.

Personally, I have CentOS installed on 28 servers, currently. I recommend to consulting clients who can afford it to buy RHEL subscriptions, and some of them do. I value the work RedHat puts into the stability of their distro, especially the kernel and compiler chain. However, I don't think using CentOS undermines RedHat any more than using Fedora Core does; you just get a more stable server environment that you don't have to upgrade every 6 months. If RedHat didn't want projects like CentOS to exist, they wouldn't give away SRPM's. Doing so makes them even better guys in my book.

CentOS not really that bad.

[PeterSomnium]

I'm a big fan of Debian myself, just because it works, I got sambaservers, proxies, all running on Debian. But when I have to set up a webserver (which I mostly do with Cpanel/WHM) I'm setting it up with CentOS, just because it runs perfectly, with everything I need. I tried this before with RH, but I don't know, CentOS just feels better for some reason.