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."
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,
If it was really that easy, CentOS wouldn't exist because there would be no value to it. For starters, packaging is no small task - one package may not work with glibc because they don't explicitely include errno.h, another has a broken makefile, another may install its files in weird places and give no option for relocating because their authors are jackasses, another utill uses imake and not make, et cetera, et cetera. Never mind building and verifying dependency chains, backporting security fixes, doing regression checking, integrating it into the platform (e.g. setting up log rotation, lsb compliant init scripts, etc).
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.