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Red Hat Pushes Out Enterprise Linux 6.1

Posted by timothy on from the so-there-are-now-two-distros dept.

wiredmikey writes "Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the platform since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 back in November 2010. The latest version brings improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, and support for upcoming system hardware. The latest version also delivers patches and security updates as well as enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability." The Register, too, outlines the new release.

90 comments

  1. Red Hat by BlyBoy · · Score: 0

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux is definitely the best Linux there is. I've been using it for 15 years and the support they give is excellent. You don't get that with Ubuntu, Debian or CentOS. For me it's not only for personal usage - our large enterprise company uses Red Hat solely on our servers. It's stable, secure and has great support from Red Hat. Not only that, but it's easy to sell for your CEO too - a big brand name that also offers excellent support, and you do not have to use Windows. Red Hat is really the best thing to happen to Linux.

    1. Re:Red Hat by Azmodan · · Score: 1

      Did you forget to log off before posting?

    2. Re:Red Hat by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      Other than the fact that apt is probably hands down the best package manager out there. I've never run into dependency hell with Debian. Never ended up with a 1/2 broken system.

    3. Re:Red Hat by Kjella · · Score: 1

      It's his first post ever, obviously created to troll this thread.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:Red Hat by spun · · Score: 1

      Forget to log off? He created the account just to post to this very story.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    5. Re:Red Hat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which is the variation of Red Hat's products that we're talking about) didn't exist until 2003, that 15-year history must have been pretty exciting (or dull) for the first seven years.

    6. Re:Red Hat by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I've never seen a RedHat shill before, but this first poster is just like that MS first post shill.

    7. Re:Red Hat by Jailbrekr · · Score: 1

      Dependency hell only happens if you don't know what you're doing. That rule applies to any package manager, and is not limited to RHEL.

      --
      Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
    8. Re:Red Hat by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      that guy must be the one who sends me recruiting emails looking for 20 years java/j2ee experience

    9. Re:Red Hat by Cougar+Town · · Score: 0

      If they wanted James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, or Patrick Naughton, they should've just said so. I think those are about the only three people who can claim 20 years of Java experience in 2011 :)

    10. Re:Red Hat by Rob+from+RPI · · Score: 1

      Actually, apt is (deliberately) missing a vital system verification tool - a way to verify the consistency of packages. rpm -qv will tell you what files have been changed since a package was installed. The debian way to do it is 'reinstall the package and see what breaks'.

      I am not making this up.

      --
      Schlock Mercenary.
    11. Re:Red Hat by rubycodez · · Score: 0

      Funny was called other things then, was called Oak in 1991 and was intended for interactive television. Then renamed to Green.

    12. Re:Red Hat by Cougar+Town · · Score: 0

      Yep. For a name like "rubycodez" you certainly know your Java history! :-)

    13. Re:Red Hat by ModMeFlamebait · · Score: 1
      cd /
      md5sum -c var/lib/dpkg/info/foo.md5sums

      There's also a tool called debsums which does roughly the same. So that gets you at least half way there.

      --
      Pavlov. Does this name ring a bell?
    14. Re:Red Hat by laurelraven · · Score: 1

      Would still be nice for a way to downgrade if an upgrade breaks something. When I had an issue like that come up, all I could find from Debian forums was "why would you want to downgrade?". Because it would have made a 5 hour outage only last 20 minutes, while I figured out what it was changing in the configs.

      Sure, best practices weren't employed in my scenario, but when I saw that yum has a method to downgrade, I realized they build their systems around the concept that people make mistakes sometimes, and need the tools to undo them easily when they affect production systems.

      --
      RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
  2. Something's missing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They're moving to 6.1 after point releases used to take them years. Case in point, 5.4 to 5.5 and then 5.5 to 5.6.
    And yet, where's the long awaited Centos 6? It's been more than 6 months, and checking distrowatch, it's the longest in more than 5 years for any "de-branding" effort.

    1. Re:Something's missing by larry+bagina · · Score: 1, Funny

      It's open source, de-brand it yourself.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:Something's missing by armanox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd recommend giving Scientific Linux a shot - their version of EL6 came out not too far behind RH.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    3. Re:Something's missing by spun · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dear Intern,

      Get back to work and stop posting on Slashdot. That's what our PR department is for.

      Signed,
      Jim Whitehurst

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    4. Re:Something's missing by Zarjazz · · Score: 1

      How can you steal something when Redhat make it available for free? You pay for Redhat if you want support and their management tools. They probably consider CentOS a loss leader, a lot of their business is likely "won" by converting sysadmins from the free distro.

    5. Re:Something's missing by linuxgurugamer · · Score: 5, Informative

      CentOS, while a great community effort, is lagging too much. If you want the lated RedHat unbranded, go to http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Quoting from their page: "SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters." I just use it, and am slowly replacing my CentOS boxes with SL.

    6. Re:Something's missing by kimvette · · Score: 2

      t. CentOS is just stealing from Red Hat and you can't expect it to be up to date.

      I'm puzzled. How can you "steal" GPL software if you make your source available upon distribution as the license requires?

      By your standard, RedHat should shut down because they "stole" work from Linus Torvalds, Novell, Caldera/SCO, SGI, IBM, HP, and many, many others who have contributed to various parts of the overall "linux" software stack,. including of course Linux itself (the kernel). Thanks to the magic of the GPL, RedHat is required to make its changes to Linux (and related GPL components) freely available so that others may either use those changes for free, or redistribute them for free or for profit. The only requirement is that the GPL components remain open and source is made available so others can enjoy the same freedom RedHat did. In fact you would be well within your rights to re-brand RedHat, brand it as "myEnterpriseOS" and charge <pinkyfinger>ONE BILLION DOLLARS </pinkyfinger> if you so desire (good luck finding someone willing to pay for it though)

      So again: How is CentOS stealing from RedHat?

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    7. Re:Something's missing by rubycodez · · Score: 0

      Your reasoning is defective, Red Hat didn't write most of the GPL software in their distribution, by your thinking they "stole" it from the FSF, the apache foundation, etc. And aside from their artwork and a few proprietary binaries, the rest is GPL so can't be "stolen".

      Centos is a wonderful project that takes GPL software (most of it *not* from Red Hat), plenty of huge corporations use it as well as small ones. If that bothers you, migrate to Windows or HP/UX or something. They turn around critical security patches in a week.

      Just because it takes them a few months to turn around major release is no big deal, people running stable servers are mature enough to wait

    8. Re:Something's missing by WuphonsReach · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How can you steal something when Redhat make it available for free? You pay for Redhat if you want support and their management tools. They probably consider CentOS a loss leader, a lot of their business is likely "won" by converting sysadmins from the free distro.

      That's why we use it.

      We use CentOS on the boxes where support doesn't matter and RHEL on the boxes where it does matter. It didn't cost us anything to dip our toes in the water and get comfortable with how CentOS does things. And that knowledge transferred right over when we started using RHEL for the important stuff.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    9. Re:Something's missing by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      How fast did SL 5.6 come out? Oh, wait.. it hasn't.. So if you have stuff running on SL 5.5, that you don't want/can't move to 6 yet your sitting and waiting...

      4.9, 5.6, and 6.0 were all released in a very short time.. CentOS decided to do the ones that were currently being used first. SL decided to go with the new shiny one (which is nice about being small, and not having many people using your software on externally facing things)

      CentOS 6 is looking to be another week or two.

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    10. Re:Something's missing by M1FCJ · · Score: 1

      But their 5.6 is not out yet. CentOS has 5.6 out and lagging on 6. Since they were released very closely, there was a vote on the CentOS lists on priorities. For example, RHEL 6 is still not certified by Oracle for RDBMS so a lot of people prefer still installing 5.6. Hence majority preferred to get the updates instead of trying out something new.

    11. Re:Something's missing by onkelringnes · · Score: 1

      It's seems they are in the final stages. Apparently external mirrors will be synced June 6.
      http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa

    12. Re:Something's missing by Kjella · · Score: 1

      In fact you would be well within your rights to re-brand RedHat, brand it as "myEnterpriseOS" and charge ONE BILLION DOLLARS if you so desire (good luck finding someone willing to pay for it though)

      Maybe not a billion, but yeah there's been quite a few cases of open source software getting a different logo slapped on, obscuring that it's GPL and bundled with ad/mal/crapware or sold as if it was payware. Generally frowned upon, but grayishly legal enough they mostly get away with it.

      I'm all for the "standing on shoulders of giants" thing, but the whole "let someone else do all the work, slap on a new logo and ship as our own" is more taking the bad with the good. Otherwise you'd run into a ton of legal misery trying to define identical or essentially similar software.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    13. Re:Something's missing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SL will have 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1 and CentOS. SL 5.6 beta

      Kind of hard to use CentOS 6.0 when it does not exist. But I guess you are right since there are no improvements in 6.0 that you need or want then there must not be any thing 6.0 that I need or want.

  3. Now where CentOS 6? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cool beans.

    Where's CentOS 6? I don't understand what's taking them so long. Don't they just remove the RedHat branding and re-package?

    1. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by carlosap · · Score: 1

      SL 6.1 cant wait :D, CentOS users should buy a confortable chair, so they can sit while waiting ...

    2. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by tupshin · · Score: 1

      http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa
      ISOs of 6.0 should be available in a week. I doubt that 6.1 will be too far behind.

    3. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      Cool beans.

      Where's CentOS 6? I don't understand what's taking them so long. Don't they just remove the RedHat branding and re-package?

      According to this thread on the CentOS bulletin board they are about to begin the QA, which means that it will probably be released soon.

    4. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      QA? Redhat already provided it. If it needed QA it would be called Fedora

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    5. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by nevillethedevil · · Score: 3, Informative

      We've been hearing that since March. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

      --
      Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
    6. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      nope, you don't understand process that Centos and Scientific Linux must do to make the binaries. Not a trivial process and is the reason for time delay, much work. Also, you'll notice that Scientific Linux has yet to put out 5.6 while Centos has, which should get you thinking....

    7. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      we have Centos running in our company doing tens of millions of dollars of e-commerce; we'll take good and tested over fast. With myself and a couple other Linux gurus, we don't need Red Hat support.

    8. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ISOs of Centos 6.0 are worthless at this point because security fixes from RedHat going forward will be based on 6.1.

      Centos has big issues. I can't see how anyone would commit to it at this point.

       

    9. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by Drew+M. · · Score: 1

      http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa
      ISOs of 6.0 should be available in a week. I doubt that 6.1 will be too far behind.

      You missed the next month:
      http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/calendar/view/2011-6

      "6.0 begin sync to external mirrors" is June 6.

      Maybe a release within a week of that.

    10. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by Drew+M. · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is the way I see it. I currently run a company with a very very large install base of machines.

      My machines are all running Centos 5.x. For me, getting 5.6 out to production is the HIGHEST priority. I could give a crap about 6.0, especially since everyone knows that the first RHEL x.0 release will be completely buggy anyway. For deploy-able stable products, RHEL 4.3 and RHEL 5.1 were the first in their series to be decent enough to run in production from our testing and bug reports back to Redhat's bugzilla. I completely expect RHEL 6.0 to be completely unstable and bug ridden, and hopefully 6.1 has ironed most of them out.

      I'd be perfectly happy if CentOS never released a RHEL x.0 release.

      I personally think Scientific Linux has their priorities backward, and CentOS is in the right. I'd rather have 5.6 before 6.0.

    11. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      CentOS probably wanted to create a new complete process for compiling the kernel w/ and w/o patches and verify it worked (since RH started rolling the patches into their distributed kernel source).

    12. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by pr0f3550r · · Score: 1

      We saw this happen this morning at ClearFoundation and are already building against 6.1 for our 6.0 release. Look for it soon.

    13. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 2

      Well I may not administer as many servers as you, but I am in the process of putting up infrastructure that will have a lifetime past the end of Centos 5. As such not having Centos 6 available is going come back and bite me in a couple of years.

      Having backports of security patches to 5.5 and 6.0 would have been a better result than the current situation.

    14. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      if your project timeline and lifespan is so very long, why are your knickers in a knot about whether Centos 6 comes out last month or next month? Since it will likely be out of QA in a week or so, what's the big deal?

    15. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      ISOS of RHEL 6 are worthless at this point because major kinks and bugs in the new release will be worked out over the next 6 months. RHEL 6 has big issues. I can't see how anyone would commit to it at this point

    16. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      Me, moderately annoyed by CentOS 6 not being out yet? Eh, not really.

      The 5.6 boxes are running fine and will be for a few more years. RHEL5 doesn't exit the normal life cycle until March 31, 2014, and the extended life cycle runs until March 31, 2017. So we have until 2014 for regular patches and 2017 for critical security patches.

      Which means that CentOS will still be shipping critical security patches until 2017 as well.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    17. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      Your putting up a set of servers that will be used past 2017? Wow!

      Thats how far 5.6 will continue to get security patches.. 2014 for regular errata updates...

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    18. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by qbrick · · Score: 1

      Even with only a single machine running with Centos5, I would have felt much more uncomfortable with that one with all the security updates from the upstream-vendor waiting for testing and release in the Centos domain, while ScientificL had them all out in-time (as quick as they usually offer them to the users). This inexplainable hiatus of bug fix and security update releases hasn't occurred for the first time. I always wonder how this behavior is overlooked by many of Centos' vocal supporters, many of them claiming to use this distro on a number of business machines and feeling happy with it, so everything is fine.

    19. Re:Now where CentOS 6? by StuffMaster · · Score: 1

      Please enlighten us! I don't understand what takes so long and neither does anybody else it seems. I always assumed that it was just yanking copyrighted stuff & recompiling, with no testing necessary.

  4. Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    Many places use Redhat and I had to downgrade to Fedora as 5.x is way too old.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
    1. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Many places use Redhat and I had to downgrade to Fedora as 5.x is way too old.

      Use Scientific Linux. It is a much better RHEL Clone and has had a 6.0 release for awhile now. And they continue to offer support updates for both the 4.x and 5.x branches of their releases.

    2. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      nope, there is no Scientific Linux 5.6 yet, but CentOS has it because they do things properly. Some people need 5.x

    3. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, if CentOS did things 'properly' the CentOS community would be allowed to participate and there would be CentOS 5.6, 6.0, and shortly 6.1.

      I have given up on CentOS because of the poor interaction with people who want to offer their service to help. Debian is looking real good to me right now.

    4. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please explain to me how CentOS does things properly and Scientific Linux does not do thing properly?

    5. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No, SL has all the *components* of RHEL 5.6 in their rolling updates, which were updated continuously since the release of RHEL 5.6. CentOS buggered themselves by holding up all updates until after they completely bundled RHEL 5.6, which was pretty useless. Rolling updates are the way Red Hat publishes them for already installed machines: you can install with any of the RHEL 5.x media and update to the current release on line, and this is what SL does. The only use fo the the RHEL 5.6 media, or bundle, is to provide a locked version with installation hardware kernel updates, and to provide a completely locked down release for forklift updates without having to pick and choose packages. This is actually an *enormous* problem for compatibility with contemporary software releases, such as ruby or perl modules, because you wind up stuck with modules that are no longer compatibile with other required modules.

      RHEL 5.x is now over 4 years old, and incompatible with numerous contemporary spftware [aclages. There is no *point* to pursuing RHEL 5 in a development or testing environment, it's only use now is legacy applications, and SL 5.5 is plenty for those. CentOS has major internal issues, screaming for "help" which they then refuse on the mailing lists and which no one can provide because their development environment has no accessible source control or working build mechanisms for other developers to work out issues from.

      CentOS is now six months behind RHEL, and more than four months behind SL. Dag Weiers of RPMforge fame has left CentOS and gone to SL, and there is now no to CentOS because it shows no signes of *ever* doing a 6.x release, and the kernel is now out of date with major features such as reliable ext4 support and the latest 4096 byte block hard drive support.

    6. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      Redhat made RHEL 5.6, SL hasn't yet. it, That is a problem for some 5.x shops.

    7. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      false, you can't get any kind of 5.6 by doing any kind of yum update in SL. CentOS 5.x works fine on the major vendor's servers because the vendors supply the drivers. Centos 5 is used by huge enterprises for DBMS, financial systems and ERP, including at some of my clients. If you're whining because RHEL / Centos 5.x doesn't support your usb camera, who gives a shit?

      Centos 6 just went to the QA team, you are talking out of your ass.

    8. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Builder · · Score: 1

      Just went to the QA team... after how many months of rude responses by members of the team, delays, uncertainty in what would happen and when?

      Even the 5.6 release was a long delayed process leaving people with open security issues.

      I've moved to Debian for my home machines, and we've moved from CentOS to RHEL at work, just to be able to get updates in a reasonable timeframe.

    9. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      incompatible with numerous contemporary spftware [aclages.

      Especially spall cheeckers.

    10. Re:Cent OS ... 6.0 yet! by sjames · · Score: 1

      Then you're using the wrong distro in the first place. 5.x is in no way outdated, it's well within it's supported lifetime.

      If you want a rapid update cycle, then Fedora is where you're supposed to be anyway, that's it's purpose.

  5. That's funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    11 years ago I was using Red Hat Linux 6.2... Seems a bit weird that they can stick "Enterprise" in the name and reset the version number, but looking at Wikipedia it looks like that's what they did... 11 years ago. There was a previous release 6.2E which was "enterprise" but not from the same numbering scheme. Weird.

    I don't use their stuff anymore, and I guess it shows.

    1. Re:That's funny by iggymanz · · Score: 0

      After they shafted the desktop users who help make them successful, and get them into the enterprise in the first place; by relegating them to guinea pigs for the half baked trial balloons in Fedora, RedHat earned the right to reset the version numbering system.

  6. Again ships with unsupported Perl by dragonquest · · Score: 3, Informative

    RHEL 6.1 is shipping with Perl 5.10.x which went legacy with the release of Perl 5.14 this week. Ah, moving targets! Though doesn't seem too bad since Debian Squeeze is also shipped with 5.10 in February this year.

    --
    "Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
    1. Re:Again ships with unsupported Perl by rubycodez · · Score: 2

      eh, RedHaT supports the Perl they ship, and charge money for doing so. meaning they make their own patches (can be good or it can be bad)

    2. Re:Again ships with unsupported Perl by dragonquest · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ah, but they can't stop CPAN module authors from releasing newer versions of modules depending on features found in 5.12+.

      --
      "Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
  7. CentOS 6 is still not out. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    CentOS 6 is still not out, so much for previous releases where they would follow 2-4 weeks behind Redhat.

    Anyone that tries to ask when CentOS might be coming out - or it's current status gets attacked by the developers instead of getting real answers.

    Many people are calling CentOS a dying project - sounds like SL is going well though.

  8. problem with Scientific Linux by rubycodez · · Score: 0

    where's your Scientfic Linux 5.6 then??!! Oh, your SL team was too busy going for the ooo-shiny 6 so that wee little thing got left behind for now.....meanwhile Centos has 5.6 and has put 6 to their QA team. Many people need a most rational road map.....

    1. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by Rob+from+RPI · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Unfortunately, there are hundreds of people willing to help with CentOS 6, but the team has just ignored them. There was a 'list of outstanding bugs' that was linked to in the 'When will CentOS 6 be released' thread, and a couple of days after that was posted, every bug had a patch against it.

      They ignored that for another couple of months, wrote their own patches, and then went off and did other things.

      Whilst Scientific Linux 5.6 is easily installable. Install 5.5 and then run 'yum update'. There's an alpha ISO around, and I think there was a beta due out shortly.

      --
      Schlock Mercenary.
    2. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by rubycodez · · Score: 0

      you miss the point, there is no SL 5.6 release. If you can fart around with "alpha" and "beta" that's another matter.....

    3. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      I've reviewed it for a recent partner: the SL update repository has _all_ the RHEL 5.6 components and ongoing updates. CentOS held up all updates for months until they completed their CentOS 5.6 release, which left their users with significant security risks and compatibility problems with use or bundling of upstream RHEL freeware components. SL is also cooperating with links to very useful 3rdparty repositories contained in their core distribution, such as EPEL and RPMforge and altrepo. These are components which RHEL is unable to directly support for various reasons, but which make Scientific Linux even _more_ useful than RHEL for development or leading edge work, and which CentOS also refuses to proved even in their "extras" repository.

      The company would not have been able to afford the RHEL 6 licenses for their entire environment: their testing environments are now SL 6, and their production hosts are RHEL 6, which saves a lot of compatibility problems. CentOS could not even be considered due to the missing version 6 release.

    4. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      Please show me the gap in the security updates where they did this "held up all updates". Helpful link below


      http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/
      ,br/>
      I get their update emails, haven't noticed any hole in the stream in the last year....

    5. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by Chang · · Score: 2

      January 6 through April 14. CentOS patches for version 5 were nonexistent.

      Take a look at the RHEL watch list for the same period and compare.

      https://www.redhat.com/archives/enterprise-watch-list/

      There has been some strong criticism of the CentOS team recently and frankly, some of it is deserved.

    6. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by javanree · · Score: 1

      Why should you respin for every update? The (S)RPM's are available so a simple yum update gives you 5.6 just fine.... and if you're working offline a simple USB stick/disk/DVD with all the updates works just fine as well. CentOS is too stuck in their ways to keep up with RedHat it appears. The 5.6 release took WEEKS for the CentOS team to be finished... so I wouldn't boast too much with that CentOS 5.6 release, judging by the posts on the centos-dev mailing list I wasn't the only one 'disappointed' in the 5.6 slowdown.

    7. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      That's a mailing list archive: not helpful to this question. Go directly to the CentOS 5.5 archive, now set aside to the "vailt.centos.org" site, and viewable sorted by date at
      http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/?C=M;O=A. Then compare it to the CentOS 5.6 release packages, and the dozens if not hundreds of published RHEL 5 updates for the time from the day _before_ the release of RHEL 5.6 and the advent of CentOS 5.6. . This kind of 4 month "pause" and the focus on completing a release rather than publishing the ongoing updates makes CentOs unsuitable for any externally exposed servers: it means any remaining 0-day exploits will remain exposed and unpatched and need to be manually built and repaired.

      This sort of thing is why production environments cannot merely slap in CentOS for production environments. The much vaunted by core maintainers "binary compatibility" with RHEL is pointless when the "compatible components" for the current release of RHEL have not been published.

    8. Re:problem with Scientific Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here you go: This is all I needed to see out of that group. Talk about amateur hour. Scientific Linux indeed.

  9. Re:Again ships with [many] unsupported [packages] by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They don't ship anywhere near current openLDAP or ATA-over-Ethernet, either.

    People say this is because they shill competing products really hard (f389, iSCSI) but Red Hat was shipping ancient (and broken, so just ancient is an upgrade) openLDAP packages way back in EL3 and even earlier, when f389 was just a twinkle in Netscape's eye.

    And as for their shameful neglect of coraid's AOE tools and drivers, well, all I can figure is Sam must have pissed off some vindictive troll over at Red Hat HQ.

  10. something missing between your ears by iggymanz · · Score: 0

    What do you imagine "debranding" is? they have to compile everything from source and test, not a trivial process.

    The distro is getting bigger, building and testing "debranded" version will take longer unless more volunteers, money and hardware are donated. they give the world their work free of charge, but turds like you sit on your ass helping no one but bitch.

    1. Re:something missing between your ears by M1FCJ · · Score: 1

      Funnily I don't see anyone complaining about Oracle Enterprise Linux. Weird. Their main aim is undercutting RedHat and making them go bankrupt by selling the same(NOT!) product.

      The same product - OEL bundles Unbreakable Linux Kernel. It might be a good thing but breaks compatibility with RHEL/CentOS and caused headaches for me.

    2. Re:something missing between your ears by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      the clients of my employer are huge operations with budgets in the tens of millions to over a billion; they all run Oracle DBMS and related products but I have yet to see anyone using Oracle Enterprise Linux. It's all RedHat for the choice of Linux, and Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, and even some Windows for the rest.

  11. Unless you want the Centos devs to start bitching by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    please keep the Centos 6 whining localized to Centos' mailing lists and to a minimum.

    thank you

  12. Re:CentOS 6 is still not out. by rubycodez · · Score: 1

    the current status is posted on forum thread, why distract the developers like a three year old in the back seat going 'are we there yet? are we there yet? are we.."

  13. And if you pull from CPAN.. by Junta · · Score: 1

    You already are going outside the realm of supported things from RHEL. Might as well install perl yourself while you are at it.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  14. CentOS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    RHEL is at 6.1 and still no CentOS 6 release? What gives?

  15. This would be really great... by Chris+Snook · · Score: 1

    ...if there were a single VM hosting provider on earth offering RHEL 6 images. I know they pissed some people off with the new pricing structure, but Red Hat has always cut special deals with hosting providers, so I'm forced to wonder what they hell they've done to piss them off so much that nobody is offering it more than 6 months after release.

    There are an awful lot of people who need the kinds of data center reliability that need million-dollar investments, but don't have the economies of scale to do it themselves. It's baffling that Red Hat is leaving that revenue opportunity on the shelf, with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS offering a much newer stable distribution, and available with a lot of different hosting providers.

    --
    There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
    1. Re:This would be really great... by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      I've worked with Red Hat distros for over ten years. It's very simple really, hosting companies don't want to deal with half-baked crap. Anything from Red Hat ending in a .0 is half baked crap. Been true in 1998, true now, no exceptions. Give Red Hat another six months or more and they'll have the bugs and kinks worked out of 6, but that steamin' pile is not fit for production now, somewhere around 6.2 or 6.3 will be golden.

    2. Re:This would be really great... by FreakyGreenLeaky · · Score: 1

      This is so true - it makes me laugh even more at the monkeys who are clamouring for centos 6.0.

    3. Re:This would be really great... by drunkahol · · Score: 1

      You should really take a step back from the keyboard and look at the history. .0 releases are, without fail, a major step forward in the technologies that Red Hat want to put in their distro. New kernel base, new packages, new security, new authentication etc. The list goes on. To call it "half-baked crap" is really little short of a half-baked comment. You can demand a flawless OS all you like, but without early adopter customers (of whom I've worked for several), these things don't stand a chance of getting ironed out. What do these early adopters get? They are first to learn how to use the new release and have accumulated a wealth of experience with RHEL x before x.1 comes out. It's their choice - just as it's your choice not to use it in the first place.

      Finally, I've worked with Red Hat distros for over ten years too. I've got the badges, felt the hurt, dealt with their support guys and even engineers. At the end of the day, it's been worth it. If what is delivered isn't what you expect/demand, change your expectations/demands, or wait until the release that does match those expectations/demands.

      Cheers

    4. Re:This would be really great... by Chris+Snook · · Score: 1

      I worked in Red Hat Support when both RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 were released. Yes, each one had growing pains that made it unsuitable for many users. Most of those problems involved:

      1) 3rd-party kernel modules
      2) combinations of motherboards/BIOSes/peripherals/firmwares that each individually worked fine, but interacted in a way that caused undefined behavior that just happened to work correctly on the previous release
      3) hardware that wasn't available for QA prior to release
      4) entirely new features that had never been widely used in enterprise environments.
      5) inadequate configuration tools or documentation

      The first three don't apply to a VM hosting provider, because they use racks upon racks of identical hardware that's been QA'd to death, and the guest OS can run either a fully-virtualized kernel that's been thoroughly tested against the VM, or a paravirtualized kernel that you've already QA'd yourself on your hardware and run across all distributions you offer. Most of the new features that the last two apply to are for scale-up use cases, not scale-down use cases, so they mostly don't apply to the typical VM hosting customer either.

      My developers want a modern LAMP stack, like the one in Ubuntu 10.04, and I want to give them that without subscribing to 3rd-party repos maintained by people who don't know how to write an RPM spec file. I'd also like it running on top of ext4, with a bunch of other management goodies in the newer distro. A RHEL 6 VM would be perfectly fine for that.

      --
      There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.