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CentOS 5.9 Released
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.
after a period of sluggishness, it's awesome the CentOS team has pulled together again after difficulties and management problems.
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.'"
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