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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."
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.
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.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
They really have to roll their own update system, because RHEL's isn't really suited for a free product.
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.
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?
"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.
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
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
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
Which again, changes absolutely nothing. They're using other people's code, which they didn't write, and are making money off of it. They aren't paying back the majority of the code contributors, and no matter how butt hurt you get over it, they aren't the primary source of all that is linux. Do they host some important projects? Sure. Does the majority of the code they use come from other people (who they aren't funding)? Yup.
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.
The whole point of open source is to benefit from other's work. This is why there are no monetary restrictions on what you do with it. It is perfectly fine to sell GPL software, if you don't like it as an OSS developer, then there are licenses which will restrict that. By using the GPL, or similar licenses, you are saying it is okay and acceptable for people to sell this code, as long as changes made to it are given back. There are just as many people profiting from their work, as they are from others, you're acting like this is bad or against OSS or something. This is the way it works.
Regards,
Steve
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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.
They're using other people's code, which they didn't write, and are making money off of it.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.