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CentOS 5.9 Released

Posted by timothy on from the for-all-your-white-box-needs dept.

kthreadd writes "The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 derivative CentOS version 5.9 has been released just 10 days after its upstream provider. According to the release notes a number of changes have been made. New packages available in CentOS 5.9 includes for example OpenJDK 7 and Rsyslog 5. Several drivers have also been updated in the kernel which has been updated to version 2.6.18-348, including support for Microsoft's virtualization environment Hyper-V." CentOS has been plugging away now for nearly 10 years.

9 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. awesome comeback by CentOS by rubycodez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    after a period of sluggishness, it's awesome the CentOS team has pulled together again after difficulties and management problems.

  2. Centos is awesome! by Openstandards.net · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm proud to say that we host all of our servers on Centos! It is the best free server OS out there, IMHO.

    --

    Open Standards Portal
    1. Re:Centos is awesome! by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      Debian is relatively atomic (though the minimal install has grown somewhat recently) and very easy to use. Redhat has scads of management tools and they maintain 'em themselves, and many of them are a bear to get running on anything but Redhat because they don't care, so if you want to use them that's a good reason to run Centos.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Centos is awesome! by morcego · · Score: 5, Informative

      How does it surpass Debian?

      It doesn't. But Debian doesn't surpass CentOS either. They are on two completely different categories.

      Debian is geared to the enthusiast and developers. Your comparison would be Fedora, not CentOS/RHEN.

      CentOS, RHEN (and other Enterprise distributions) are geared toward enterprise. So you will never find the latest version of softwares (CentOS 5.9 has PHP 5.1.6, apache 2.2.3 etc), but instead you get more stable version and, specially, no API changes. So from 5.0 to 5.XXX, there will be no API or ABI incompatibilities (this usually means a lot of backports to fix bugs). The flip side is that you won't be able to run a lot of the newer stuff that requires newer versions of libs and stuff.

      It is a tradeoff, and you really can't compare the two.
       

      --
      morcego
    3. Re:Centos is awesome! by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Red Hat actually updates a few packages to newer version. Typical things are certain desktop software like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. You will occationally also get complele new packages, like OpenJDK 7 in this release.

      Debian on the other hand has a hard policy of updating as little as possible, which is actually sometimes problematic on desktops. We have a lot Debian desktops deployed in our organization; currently running on the latest stable release, squeeze from about two years ago. It's actually a problem for us when we want to buy new hardware because the squeeze kernel may not completely support it, and we don't really want to run testing in a production environment. In comparison Red Hat backports a ton of drivers which means that even something as old as RHEL 5 may work just fine on relatively modern hardware.

  3. CentOS is awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been using it at work for a few years now.

    I used to dislike it because the packages were a bit older than everything I'd be able to install on a personal Linux machine running something different.

    But there is definitely something to be said about having a stable ABI. Anything I build on my CentOS 6 VM I can run on another CentOS 6 machine. Not sure if the same can be said for other distributions if one of the systems has had upgrades to some of its libraries at some point.

    Big thanks to the CentOS team for all their hard work.

    Now, RedHat, please do not include GNOME 3 in RHEL 7. Use MATE or something. But please, for the sake of people who use your platform as a TOOL and not a TOY, keep GNOME 3 out!!

    1. Re:CentOS is awesome by fnj · · Score: 4, Informative

      Now, RedHat, please do not include GNOME 3 in RHEL 7. Use MATE or something. But please, for the sake of people who use your platform as a TOOL and not a TOY, keep GNOME 3 out!!

      Bad news for you. It is well known that RHEL 7 *will* use Gnome 3 for the default supported desktop. Unless they really break with tradition, KDE will also be an option. Beyond that, you'll have to resort to third party repos.

      And it's hardly a surprise. Good god, man, Red Hat is the prime force *behind* Gnome 3. Oh yeah, another piece of crap news: the systemd abortion is going to be in there, too.

      When RHEL 6 reached EOL, I sure as hell am going to be looking very seriously at bsd for my servers.

  4. Re:What am I missing? by CannonballHead · · Score: 4, Informative

    Don't they fork RHEL? RHEL 5.9 came out relatively recently. RHEL still provides updates to 5x and 6x, so it makes sense that CentOS would also still be putting out CentOS 5x in tandem with 6x.

  5. Re:backdated announcments by dustwun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Their rpm announcements were all back dated.

    They didn't release any of the 5.9 rpms on the dates they are making public.

    You mean the packages that were released prior to the 5.9 install media in the Continuous Release repo? Perhaps you should review this page - http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CR