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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."
I'll be sure to try this release out though. :-)
According to their website, it stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System. I've never heard of them. Are they related to Microsoft ENTerprise Operating System? I'm fairly certain I've seen ads for that somewhere.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
Obligatory Wikipedia link. CentOS is a project which uses the source packages published by Red Hat in order to create an Enterprise Linux solution that can compete with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is distributed only in uncool binary form. While the differences between RHEL and Fedora Linux, the everyday consumer version, are not great--they are often documented in a single book, as in Wiley's Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible , CentOS is probably not important news for most Linux hobbyists.
Parent is probably being lame.
For you non-native English speakers, this means that there are at least one hundred available instances of: "Dude, it's like totally mirrored.".
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
RHEL ES3 got its 7th Update pack over RHN only a few days ago. These CentOS guys don't waste time!
CentOS is great when you need to run a RedHat supported application, but don't feel you need to fork out a subscription.
I'm really impressed with CentOS, although I don't know how RedHat feels about them simply piggybacking all the source-code to backported package updates and security fixes that RedHat worked hard to produce.
READY.
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So, does this mean a fork and that CentOS is becoming its own distro? I had been lead to believe that CentOS was an identical clone of RHEL with the logos removed. This article summary would suggest that there are now more differences. What is CentOS 4.3? Is it RHEL or is it a new distro?
DistroWatch - News for nerds. Stuff that...
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!
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I don't remember seeing a slashdot article when RHEL4 U3 was released. CentOS is beating RHEL on distrowatch though. Good, stable distro, perfect for most uses, just like all the other major distros. I have it installed on most of our servers at work and one desktop at home.
Were it binary only, what source packages would the CentOS folks use?
It's a reliable "clone" of RHEL, it's free, it's very well supported and it placed 2nd in the most recent Linux Journal reader's choice awards.
I'd say that makes it important and relevant for hobbyists and people who are using their servers for real work alike.
Cheers,
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
sig?
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?
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.
That is definitely a joke, for those that don't get it ;-)
(CentOS, Mentos, get it?)
how is installing RPM's hard? when i used FC2 everything was quite straight foreward, either i needed to pass it paramaters and the correct command line and arguments were specified on the readme or installation parts of the site, or you could simply double click the RPM from the desktop.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Its kinda lame to take stock RHEL and recompile it. I can't see how the CentOS team is at all passionate about a movement that boils down to recompiling the latest release of someone else's work. At least add something of value...
That's the whole point of CentOS. RedHat is a stable and conservative distro and some people want or need RedHat compatibility for... whatever reason. It's not your job (or mine) to tell people what you (or I) think they need.
Certainly there are more than enough other distros who want more (or less or different) features than CentOS offers.
"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.
For people who don't want to buy a RHEL support contract it's great. Simple as that.
I can't see how the CentOS team is at all passionate about a movement that boils down to recompiling the latest release of someone else's work. At least add something of value...
All other distros do to add something of value is usually another package management system (like we all need another).
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http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2006032 1034114
5 55243
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/1
Should Open Source be hidden behind licensing fees? I think that's a poor question. A better questions should be "How do people plan on paying open source developers?". The food they eat, the electricty they need, you can't exactly rpm -Uvh that from somewhere. In the end, someone has to write a check somewhere.
In previous releases kernel compilation borked due to several problems. At least one error was due to a typo in one of the scripts. (In all fairness the problem might not be Centostrific)
The Freshmaker!
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.
... and work with both CentOS and RHEL.
... anyone heard of Asterisk@home, SME Server, openfiler, Rocks Clusters ... plenty more:
y topic=11
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 things out there based on CentOS as their core OS
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?stor
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.
Penny - plain text accounting
I'm so glad I'm not a fat piece of shit.
What, you've lost weight? I hadn't noticed.
I originally started on RedHat for my customers. I bought them $65/year update contracts for each server and thought it was a great and workable system. RedHat decided it wasn't the right model for a profitable business. That's their prerogative as a business. I now use CentOS and it is great. Although I use Kubuntu on my laptop and Debian on certain infrastructure machines, I find RHEL/CentOS to be more polished for my customers (mostly standalone without sysadmin) branch office servers, web servers and even mail servers. With the help of Dag Weers yum/apt repository you can build some pretty killer servers that will autopatch themselves for a long time. So what, that it is a respin of RHEL? Ubuntu and a zillon other distros respin Debian. That is the OSS way.
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
A number of hosting facilities seem to disagree with you. CentOS appears to be rather widely deployed in the shared and dedicated server space. But hey, what do those people know. They're probably just playing around with it while they study for their certification....
If I run CentOS at home, what commercial distro am I most comfortable with? And if I'm already running RHEL at work (which I do), I can pre-test anything I want to do at home on CentOS.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Geez. Reading the comments on this story leads to me to think that people are either very ignorant, or astroturfing. I can't see how CentOS is a negative in any manner whatsoever, or that they are ripping anyone off. I'd recompile the Redhat distro for my own use, but I don't have the time to do that and manage 30 servers facing the internet. I pay for a number of licenses from Redhat, and also use CentOS in some situations. That's bad? Redhat doesn't think so- and have said so publicly. Living in a world of soundbites and Maureen O'Gara must equal "ignorance is bliss".
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Staying on top of all the bug & security fixes after the release is what takes time. The CentOS guys have been doing great at what is a thankless job.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
From the CentOS about page:
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:
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)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
"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"
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.
I think it's worth emphasizing that it is more than just copying the "feel" of RHEL. Centros aims to be binary compatible with the comparable RHEL release. I.e. every RPM that can be installed on RHEL can be installed on a Centros box. This is incredibly useful for situations where you want the long-life that Red Hat guarantees with RHEL, but can't or won't pay for it. FWIW, I first learned about Centros when it came with my VPS account. It's been good to me so far.
In the debate, I'm agnostic.
... the problem actually turned out to be a linux kernel bug. The bug was introduced early in the 2.6.16 development cycle and was fixed by the time 2.6.16 went live.
But.. I work on an s390 emulator. Recently, a Centos packager contacted me about an apparent problem with the emulator
Sounds like a good deal all around to me.
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.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I love CentOS and thank god it ramped up when it did. RH9 support was over and I was concerned about an upgrade path. I looked at a bunch of distros but honestly, as an admin/programmer I don't want to deal with learning all the details about another distro since I've been using Redhat for years. So CentOS picked up speed (and users) and have been releasing a solid product for years (based off the hard work from Redhat and the OSS developers of course).
Also, don't forget to donate. 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
Plain and simple
drives 3 cars, a Mercedes SLK32, a BMW convertible, and an Acura SUV
I thought Linus understood parallelization. By having three cars he won't arrive three times sooner.
I don't think that word means what you think it does:
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"
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Asterisk at home uses centos, I am not sure why, but that is where I found out about it.
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
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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.
I rm -rf
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.
well ... the centos team isn't paid at all for there work. It's all volunteer.
Redhat's first releases were ripped off (and I'm not using that in a negative way) from Slackware way back even though RH is almost a completely different disto now. Mandrake (Now Mandriva) was also ripped off from Redhat before they went their own direction.
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 there but distros all use the GPL'd changes (or sometimes whole GPL'd software) from each other. I've seen code from Redhat in SuSE, SuSE in debian, Redhat in Mandriva, ect....it goes on.
There is nothing wrong with CentOS as long as they don't use RH logos.
In academia? Holy crap, you must not be in a public university. When I was attending a couple years ago, they offered RedHat EL for free to any student who asked. But like the vendors, we only officially supported that one distro.
John - you and the rest of the Centos team are doing a fabulous job, thank you for that. We're using Centos on several production servers here and we couldn't be happier with your work and the great support community.
You can even go to a CentOS mirror, download/install the appropriate centos-release, yum, and centos-yumconf rpms (have to --force the centosrelease one, and there may be a few other dependencies you will need to get and install (python-urlgrabber, python-elementree, sqlite come to mind)), and then run 'yum update' on your RHEL boxes to migrate to centOS. I started to try and go from RHEL3 to CentOS 4 on one box (yesterday) but there are soo many dependencies. I ended up just upgrading to CentOS 3.6.
I did the same for a day, that warewulf cluster toolkit, but it used waaay too much memory for the ramdisk for our needs.
I ended up setting up dhcpd-tftp for serving the hand rolled kernel (with openmosix patched in), and served the node filesystem using LTSP. My (slave) nodes run using a paltry 19 Mb ramdisk now. (warewulf was well over 100 MB, if memory serves)
Centos is a great distro.. using it on servers and desktop for a long time now. Recently installed 4.2 on a load of blade servers and now updating it which couldn't be simpler.. type 'yum update' and carry on with my day.
We're getting a little off topic, but you can build the VNFS as a hybrid filesystem with "--hydrid --excludes-agressive=". This basically pulls all the non-essentials over NFS, we've been able to run X11 apps using warewulf with a 15-30MB ramdisk. If you have a half-decent setup you'll have different network adapters for NFS and MPI so the two don't step on each other's toes. As long as the program doesn't need to keep reloading libs (Gaussian for example is a pain for this reason), it works very well.
Also, if NFS solution isn't attractive you can add a few lines in rc.local to copy frequently used libs to a local partition on startup.
Cheers,
Jeff
... and I saw that my product helped make RedHat and other companies make money so people could easily deploy MY software, I'd be pretty goddamn proud!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...many companies purchase "perfunctory" RHEL licenses anyway to have the feel-good phone support and to diagnose performance issues, and sometimes just to throw a bone to the company because they are aware of the CentOS lineage.
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.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
CentOS + yum + Dag == more time to do other stuff at work.
It has acutally gotten easier. I can attest for having problems myself with RPMs in FC2. But no such thing in FC3/FC4. There is this nice little application called yum.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Centos is definitely one of the top 5 open source projects for developers (along with Eclipse, Sun Java(technically), GCC and KDE.
I can't thank them enough for all their hard work.
Now if they would only put NTFS support in the compiled versions. I always feel guilty running an unsupported kernel, like I am disappointing them.
I've got to give it to them, this infamous hacker group sure is productive in updating their website hacking and defacement tools. I am bothered that despite a respected public servant with years and years of computer experience already alerting the Internet community to the threat of this "CentOS", nothing is being done about it. Who knows, maybe they will soon manage to infiltrate systems more crucial to National Security... tomorrow, a municipal government website. Tomorrow, the Pentagon!
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.