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CentOS Linux 6.0 Released
dkd903 writes "The CentOS team just announced the availability of CentOS Linux version 6.0 for both i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 6.0 is based on the upstream release of RHEL 6.0 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and includes packages from all variants."
There has been a lot of drama recently about why CentOS 6 took so long to be released. Things to consider; To maintain binary compatibility, they need to not just replace the copyright material and build the source. They need to duplicate the build environment *exactly*. Compile flags, build order, etc. This while also keep the EL5 and EL4 releases updated and patched. This is something EL derivatives like Scientific Linux do not concern themselves with, for better and worse. I do know that the CentOS team have been working to improve their project, and some hear may have ideas and suggestions. Please feel free to join the CentOS mailing list(s) and pass along your ideas. Digimer
"I'd rather have friends who care than friends who agree with me." - Arlo Guthrie
I don't know about cool but it is a very good and stable platform for a busines. It is also the only distro that really seems to have got on top of SELinux.
Thank youCentOS team!
Most netbooks are 32-bit x86 (i386.) It's not safe to assume x64 is universal among PC's yet.
Moved all of my machines that weren't already CentOS to CentOS from Fedora over the last two months. I used Fedora 15 for all of about ten minutes before I got tired of Fedora's attempt to pretend that they are the Ubuntu project.
In this case the 'i386' refers to "the "i386" architecture" ie,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32
The 32bit rpms you may note are .i686 and will not run on 386, 486 or 586 processors.
Considering they will be supporting 6.0 for 7 years, I don't think six months is a long time to build the testing and releasing infrastructure. For you to say that "most people using CentOS have moved on" is basically patently false. If you have any statistics or evidence to back up that statement, I'd love to hear them sir. I'm sure we'll see quite soon when the download numbers are out. CentOS is the only binary compatible free version of RHEL, which is the only truely commercial business Linux available (ok, there's IBM still, but no Novell anymore). If I need to go from free CentOS to supported RHEL, I can do that very easily with my existing applications and configurations. And they have GOOD support, as in some of the best I've ever seen. And great documentation. And training. I look at Ubuntu and I see a distro that's one big mistake away from collapsing. I also see a desktop distro for consumers and not a business system.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
CentOS is basically a dead project to the majority of people who have moved on to more responsive distributions.
That must be why CentOS runs 30% of the Net's Web servers according to sjvn.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Quite the opposite. I was expecting it to be a non-event, too. Instead, reading the announcement, I found much to be excited about.
First, while this is technically 6.0, the announcement specifically says the 6.1 updates will be going in to the rolling release branch right away, so when you do a "yum update" you'll get all the 6.1 goodness, in short order.
Secondly, their plans for LiveCD images and minimal-install CD images in the next few days, which serve important niches and which Redhat didn't even provide with their release, are very exciting too, and fills a huge need.
Besides that, companies are incredibly slow to upgrade their infrastructure anyhow. RHEL6 is a pretty major change, so people weren't rolling it out to their servers the day it was released. I know we're a fully paid-up RedHat shop and we haven't upgraded ANYTHING to RHEL6 yet.
The CentOS folks stated their inability to commit enough resource to support both 6.0 and 5.6 releases simultaneously, and got an overwhelming number of requests to go for 5.6 rather than 6.0, so we already know what most people's needs really are.
Honestly, if anyone was so desperate for the new features in RHEL6, they would have jumped ship long before even the RHEL6 beta came out. RHEL5 was getting very long in the tooth, so if you had a real need for what's available now, why didn't you switch to Fedora 13, more than a year ago? Where are these people that desperately needed these updates 6 months ago, but didn't need them 18 months ago and were happy with RHEL5 until just recently?
Really, a few (and I do mean a few, certainly not "the majority") impatient folks that didn't feel like waiting for a CentOS6 desktop to play with, aren't representative of anything. And if you did switch to SL6, RHEL6, or Fedora 13, it's just a repo change and a yum upgrade to go back to the CentOS packages.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The naming of x86-64 has a funny history. Back in 2001 or so, AMD called the 64-bit extensions to x86 simply "x86-64". By 2003 however they decided to change the name to "AMD64". Of course, by then Intel was already trying to copy it. They revealed this to the public in 2004, first calling it "IA-32e", and soon after "EM64T". When they released their Core 2 processor in 2006 as the second processor to support it (first was Prescott and it's variants), they renamed it again to "Intel 64". On the matter of "IA-32", that name was coined I think when they were developing Itanium (before x86-64 even existed). The Itanium architecture was called "IA-64". Later on as x86-64 gained prominence, Intel renamed the "IA-64" architecture to "IPF" (Itanium Processor Family) to avoid confusion.
It wasn't until CentOS 6.0 was delayed beyond reasonable expectation did I find out CentOS was managed by a very small, closed group. The closed part was a little unnerving considering the open source nature of the project.
As I understand the common team and community positions, from the long debates on the -devel list:
1) The source is open, the project is not.
1a) After saying this, much of the build information has been dribbled out on the list anyway, but only after heated encouragement.
1b) There is no interest in codifying this build information (ala a B(uild)RPM file to automate the process). See also: 3b.
2) The C in CentOS (community) refers to the target of the product, not the process.
3) Many people on the list would like to see an open project, run by the community, more like Fedora.
3a) This would lead to faster releases.
3b) It is assumed this would create friction with Redhat by helping its competition, and thus cool relations with the CentOS team or cause Redhat to discontinue its fully-open strategy for software it writes.
3c) There has been talk that after 6.1 is out the door that the team will look into addressing some of these concerns.
3d) Nobody has talked seriously about fork, yet. There's probably no RHEL 7 on the horizon, so there's a long time to prepare if it ultimately becomes necessary. Whitebox Linux to CentOS in a way proved the viability of this option, but almost nobody would prefer it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
CentOS jumped the shark quite a while ago. I'd say 2009. Lance Davis, the founder, flew the coop (just literally went AWOL) and no one thought to get control of the centos.org domain from him for a year. Meantime you couldn't contribute to the project using PayPal. Then the developers got an unenviable reputation for arrogance and supercilious unfriendliness to the desires of mere users. Finally there was the extremely long delay for 6.0. The release of 5.6, which wasn't all that rapid either, brought to the surface a disturbing problem with security updates for 5.5 not being forthcoming while 5.6 was being worked on.
Many of these problems have been addressed; some haven't, at least not fully. Most anyone who had a serious need to be in the right technology DECADE this year has already jumped ship to Redhat, Scientific Linux, or PUIAS. I can't say enough good thing about PUIAS. They have 6.1 already. They are no johnny come latelies, as they have been around longer than CentOS.