CentOS 4.3 Multi-Platform Release 172
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."
Hmmm (Score:1, Redundant)
I'll be sure to try this release out though. :-)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Uh, sure, if the GP wants to spend the next several days compiling/configuring every... last... thing... (which is the purpose of Gentoo--total control of your OC).
CentOS is a rock solid platform. What exactly (besides a distro-flame war) do you hope to accomplish by such an indictment against a perfectly good OS??
CentOS-4.3-i386-binDVD.torrent [linuxtracker.org]
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
I wouldn't have made that mistake if you hadn't made me so upset! ;-)
CentOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:CentOS? (Score:3, Informative)
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:CentOS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CentOS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:CentOS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
As our 1 year contracts expire, I don't renew them and all new installs run on CentOS.
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
Re:CentOS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
How could Redhat ever do that?
Re:CentOS? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:CentOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat brings a ton of value to the free software world, not just in the resources that the distribution, but in development as well. They employ a very significant number of kernel developers, gcc developers (remember, they bought Cygnus and inherited most of their employees), gnome developers, et cetera. They've acquired a number of previously propriety software and open sourced them - think GFS and Netscape Enterprise Directory Server (now Fedora Directory Server) for starters.
That's not to say I have any qualms about using CentOS. Red Hat benefits from other projects, other projects benefit from Red Hat. That's the beauty of the free software community.
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
It will just never touch
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
There is a very important difference between the average freebie distribution and Red Hat Enterprise though - longevity and stability. With most of the free distributions (Fedora included) you're looking two or three years of updates if you're lucky; with Red Hat Enterprise, you're covered until 2012. And typically Red Hat doesn't just blin
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
No, it's not hard (Score:2)
Re:CentOS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hardly. What you are paying for is a support contract for that specific build of RHEL on a specific machine or set of machines. Redhat is in the business of selling support contracts, they've choosen to sell them for specific builds of the RHEL distribution. There is no deeper, trickier meaning beyond that.
Red Hat has no problem with not paying for OSS packages it uses, why should I have a problem with not paying Red Hat?
Whether they do or do not make any significant contributions to the OSS/Free source base is irrelevant.
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
Re:CentOS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Give me a fucking break. RedHat pays Alan Cox's salary. RedHat is big into the development of gcc and glibc. RedHat has become basically the standard for Linux distros (for bad or good). RedHat is only by more PBHs than SuSe, and second to Suse by almost nobody, depending on the region of the world you come from. RedHat has been known and is still (via Fedora) the "bleeding edge" distro. And that has made a number of OSS packages to keep up to date and squash a bunch of latent bugs in the process. To my knowledge, RedHat is the most supported Linux distro when multiplied by the number of platforms it runs on (3rd party support, software actually working support, paid for Indian support, don't blame me support, etc).
As far as the US, and much of the Linux community is concerned, RedHat is a "good thing".
Personally, I would rather use Debian or Gentoo, but I have only been inconvenienced with running RedHat Linux. Performance is above average, stability is above average, ease of install is well above average, 3rd party support is second to none, etc.
Like RedHat or not, they have done good stuff for the computing world.
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
And is this a good thing for the Fedora users / beta testers? Most of them don't even know they are using a "bleeding edge" distro, and this does more harm than good to the image of free software. Now all those users will think that free software is as buggy as Fedora is.
Re:CentOS? (Score:2)
Red Hat funds a great deal of today's Linux development. They pay people to work full-time on many Free software products, including the Linux kernel itself.
Mod parent funny! (Score:2)
CentOS used as a base for stack installs (Score:2)
Pros and cons of this distro and distros in general?
OK, that just my nickel
please type the word in this image: nickel
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Not important news? What are you smoking? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say that makes it important and relevant for hobbyists and people who are using their servers for real work alike.
Cheers,
Re:Not important news? What are you smoking? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not important news? What are you smoking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Jeff
Re:Not important news? What are you smoking? (Score:3, Informative)
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:A clone of RHEL (Score:2)
Yeah, hobbyists pay the bills.
I use CentOS on many hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. To me, the support and the quality of the OS is better than that I can pay extra from from RedHat. And, yes, I have done both.
More specifically, a binary compatible clone. (Score:2)
Re:A clone of RHEL (Score:2)
This is not true. The "Enterprise" label means that the distro places importance on stability, both as it applies to crashes and as it applies to software versions. You won't get a bleeding-edge version of the kernel, and you won't get surprised with a version of PHP that breaks your shit when you run an update. RedHat makes an effort to back-port security fixes to previous versions of software included in its
"100 total mirrors" Explainer (Score:2)
For you non-native English speakers, this means that there are at least one hundred available instances of: "Dude, it's like totally mirrored.".
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2, Insightful)
see how that works? Welcome to open source.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a look at the base install packages of RHEL4 and let me know how many of them were written by Redhat and get back to me.
Get YOUR facts straight.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2, Troll)
It only took you an entire rant and an extra post to bounce your head off the clubie branch. +1 insightful!
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:4, Insightful)
With their permission of course. Red Hat is complying with the entire letter and spirit of the F/OSS licenses under which they obtained the code. In GPL, it's as simple as this: you can take, modify and redistribute my software, as long as you pass along the same rights to users of the modified work. This doesn't preclude make a buck, or even a lot of bucks.
If this is not what the original authors intended, they should have used a license that allowed modified version to be distributed for non-commercial purposes only. If they chose the GPL "by accident", then they should speak up; if enough of the contributors to a particular project raise enough of a ruckus, there's always a possibility Red Hat would replace that project in their products.
But none of us, who aren't contributors to the code in question, have have any right to speak on the behalf of the authors.
If I was an OSS developer... (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Actually, these days, it does tend to be one of the fastest, as well.
So Patrick V of Slackware should be pissed too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is this any different?
What Redhat Brings to the table is mainly service and support (that is what they are charging for). Sure..they do A LOT of great development work (and that's a good thing) it may even be more than just about any distro out ther
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
I don't know how the linux kernel devel's feel about redhat piggybacking and using their kernel to make money...
Except that Red Hat has a value-add - you get a lot more from RHEL than you get from kernel.org. If you made an application server based on RHEL + something on top and sold it as a package,
Despite this... (Score:2)
RedHat knows that people will deploy CentOS and un-backed RHEL internally for non-critical uses while purchasing full licenses for critical systems or reference systems... and it's priced that way.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:1)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:1)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Perfect example. We *WE'RE* running DB2 UDB on RHAS 2.1. Every so often there would be a spike in load average where all activity on the system would be blocked. It would only last a few seconds but the backlog would take 5 or 10 minutes to clear up. After speaking with IBM AND Redhat on the issue, it came down to a vm flushing issue. The VM would flush and in the process block ALL system activity WHILE it was doing this. It only happened under VERY high loads and only on large systems (our
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
ttyl
Farrell
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
I suppose some of those who prefer CentOS might be those who get upset that anyone should make a profit off of something that is free (imagine that... farmers making a profit off of apples; or people selling mistletoe around Christmastime).
Then, some of those who support CentOS might be microsoft fan-boys, who imagine that harming Red Hat will ai
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Those who like Redhat but don't want to pay for it?
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
I'm not talking about business usage, my company buys RH licenses for the servers and workstations that use it.
So Red Hat is still getting dollars from the people I work for, and Centos is allowing me to work at ho
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
Or maybe people who have to use Red Hat (eg: for Oracle) for some machines and want the rest to be identical to make systems administration easier.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2)
I have to have RHEL for Websphere but I don't have to for apache or for samba where we aren't installing a commercially supported product or need a support contract.
Don't speak where you don't understand.
Re:Wow, that was quick! (Score:2, Informative)
Since they arent relying on productising their code, this doesnt hurt their
Huray for CentOS (Score:2)
CentOS is one of my favorite distributions. I use them on numerous servers as well as my desktop and laptop computer. For those who didn't have the chance to check it out, you should.
There are many RPM packages out there and this distribution is extremely stable. I'm proud for them to release another release!
Newsworthy indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
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/Ce
rpm -y upgrade
reboot
Don't blame me. Should work, no guarantees.
~Will
Re:Upgrade (Score:2, Insightful)
yum update
and unless the kernel was updated (mine wasn't), that's all you need to do!
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
You probably have kernel* in your yum.conf's exclude directive. CentOS 4.3 ships with a later kernel (2.6.9.29) which hopefully fixes the iowait bug in 2.6.9.22 that shipped with 4.2
Re:Upgrade (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Mmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Can be a benfit to Redhat (Score:2)
Please stop using 386. (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Please stop using 386. (Score:2, Informative)
The exceptions are the kernel, ssh, glibc.
The correct arch is i386
Re:Please stop using 386. (Score:2)
Seriously enough, x86 means {?86} or anything-86. Linux doesnt run on a 286. It runs on a 386,486,586.. etc etc, and I dont think the Athlon FX 57 quite has a simple number as that. However the 386 code is the common denominator, just as code with NX bit is the common denominator for the OSX.
Re:Please stop using 386. (Score:2)
At last! (Score:3)
SuSe, Mandriva, are you paying attention to this???
Stale mirrors = loads of faffing about searching the web for a URL to copy, pasting it into software manager, then trying to work out how much of the path to paste in and what magic words like "base", "unstable", "updates" need to be added at the end. Also, some mirrors are slower than others so I then have to repeat the process until a geographically close mirror provides enough download speed. For anything less than an intermediate user that means the software installer/updater is effectivly dead.
Re:At last! (Score:2)
The only thing that is missing is the "geographically close". But there IS a list of mirror servers that is downloaded by Yast Online Update.
Maybe you have disabled the download of that list? (that is an option, which it offers when there turns out to be no Internet connection during the first update attempt)
Don't Forget to Donate (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, don't forget to donate [centos.org]. While my company didn't pay for RH9, I was able to get them to fork out some cash for the CentOS team. I would have to do A LOT more work if it weren't for those guys.
--Ajay
CentOS not really that bad. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CentOS not really that bad. (Score:2)
WE have a bunch of old Poweredge 2800 servers here working as a printfarm and other simple tasks (you cant ask a pair of P-III 600 processors to do much these days) well all of them went down last weekend.
What happened? we ran the updates on all of them with a regular scheduled task. sunday morning when they rebooted on another scheduled task they all hung after the bootloader on a kernel panic. The new kenel that downloaded and installed fo
Re:Does This Mean A Fork? (Score:1)
Re:Does This Mean A Fork? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does This Mean A Fork? (Score:2)
Speaking of updates: http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ [vt.edu] - updates 4x per day, 622 mbits.
Yay, I run an official CentOS mirror.
~Will
Re:kinda lame (Score:3, Insightful)
Recompiling somebody else's work? That's what most distributions are. CentOS, Whitebox, et al can be passionate about accomplishing their goal, which is a freely available RHEL compatible distribution. Why should all that Free Software be hidden behind massive license fees?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:kinda lame (Score:2, Informative)
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:kinda lame (Score:2, Informative)
There is a CentOS Extras repo and CentOS Plus repo that produce packages that are not upstream
CentOS submits MANY bugfixes and patches to Red Hat code back upstream.
There are also many other
Re:Centos-Half good Half bad (Score:2)
Re:Centos-Half good Half bad (Score:2, Informative)
Redhat's Up To Date is GPL'd and in the distro. Along with Yum. Both work great.
Re:Paltry (Score:2)
Adjective
* S: (adj) negligible, paltry, trifling (not worth considering) "he considered the prize too paltry for the lives it must cost"; "piffling efforts"; "a trifling matter"
* S: (adj) measly, miserable, paltry (contemptibly small in amount) "a measly tip"; "the company donated a miserable $100 for flood relief"; "a paltry wage"; "almost depleted his miserable store of dried beans"