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Operating Systems Software Businesses Red Hat Software Linux

CentOs 4.0 Released 48

Posted by timothy from the oh-you-mean-xandros dept.
fluor2 writes "The CentOS team is pleased to announce availability of CentOS 4.0. Major new features include the Linux 2.6 Kernel, SELinux, udev replacing the /dev system, Xorg, MySQL4, CyrusIMAPD, Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3. These improvements along with many more are detailed in the release notes available online. We read recently about Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage, and the solution is now to link to a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor (PNAELV).
Go ahead and download CentOs from one of their mirrors."
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CentOs 4.0 Released More

CentOs 4.0 Released

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  • some explanation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @01:38PM (#11825663) Homepage Journal
    I'd never heard of Centos, so I looked it up. It's an interesting idea.

    They take the source code for RHEL, build it, and put it on an ISO.

    Sounds interesting, I imagine if I were to try and sell my bosses on a Linux system for work they'd want something like RHEL, and this is a way to get hold of it and try it without buying a license. you could get a full prototype going and not need to spend any money until you wanted a real copy with a support contract.

    • well.... (Score:2, Informative)

      by sethadam1 ( 530629 ) *
      It's not new. It used to be Whitebox Linux, and then the two projects merged. It's certainly not a novel idea to recompile all of Red Hat's SRPMs. Remember linuxinstall.org? Or JAMD? All of these projects are essentially recompiles plus one or two tweaks.

      Whitebox is/was pretty popular, and CentOS looks to be a good product too. It's not quite the new fledling it seems you think. You should try it. It even works with regular RHEL/Fedora yum repositories.

      • Re:well.... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by biglig2 ( 89374 )
        I'm afraid you do me an injustice; I'm not quite vain enough to believe that just because I've never heard of something that means it must be so new that no-one else has either. ;-)

        I think I will try it, actually, it sounds very interesting.
      • Whitebox linux had nothing to do with CentOS. Ever. You need to get your facts correct dude...

        CentOS isnt a one man show - for starters - and the updates and community support actually exist.

        Using CentOS or RHEL for that matter with a Fedora repository is one of the only definite ways to smash up your system....
        • Rrrrr... I did get my facts crossed. Somehow, I got Whitebox, which we actually used on one server, confused with cAos Linux and CentOS, which are both projects from the same peeps. My bad, definitely.

          Incidentally, I have installed packages, in a previous server install, from a Fedora yum repo to Whitebox. It worked just fine.
        • Using CentOS or RHEL for that matter with a Fedora repository is one of the only definite ways to smash up your system....

          This is what i do: keep yum and up2date pointed at standard centos mirrors. Install apt-get, point it to freshrpms, dag, newrpms, etc...

          I use yum for my system updates, apt-get (with "sanitized" repository settings, no base/core/updates) for my extra packages like mplayer, flash, et al.

          Works quite well actually.

      • Re:well.... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Sosarian ( 39969 )
        The projects are unrelated.

        If you'd like to migrate from WBEL:
        Migration from WBEL to Centos [centos.org]

        Also check out Whiteboxlinux.net [whiteboxlinux.net] you'll see that the site maintainer was growing frustrated with lack of updates to Whitebox, and switched over to Centos.

        The projects were started about the same time.

        There are also other competing projects Taolinux, Rocks, XOS, etc...

    • Re:some explanation (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Sounds interesting, I imagine if I were to try and sell my bosses on a Linux system for work they'd want something like RHEL, and this is a way to get hold of it and try it without buying a license. you could get a full prototype going and not need to spend any money until you wanted a real copy with a support contract.

      http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/eval/
    • I'd never heard of Centos
      That's "GNU/Centos", buster, and don't you forget it!

  • How similar is it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mogrify ( 828588 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @01:43PM (#11825712) Homepage
    Can someone speak to the differences between Red Hat and CentOS, if any? Are there any caveats for running this in production, or as a testing box for a production RHEL server? Any missing features? Are the RPMs 100% compatible, no worries? How about customized RPMs? Is it really just as simple as RHEL4 with no support and RHN?

    • Re:How similar is it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro@gmaDALIil.com minus painter> on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @01:53PM (#11825810) Journal
      from the centOS site
      "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free, however, we ask for a small contribution. CentOS is a project of the cAos Foundation."

      So it apears the only changes made are to remove brandings. So i would imagine it would run in a near identical fashion to RHEL ,
      http://www.centos.org.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]
      all the info is on the main page(coral cach just incase) , i cant tell you definantly if they achive this goal , but I see very little reason as to why they shouldnt , unless redhat is not
      opening all its sources , which is unlikly.

    • Re:How similar is it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:58PM (#11826463)
      CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the bullying tactics.

      I have run CentOS for about a year now on several hundred machines and it works great. The major caveat if you're used to Red Hat is you need to work out a different patch management system since RHN/up2date isn't there. But yum is built in, and works quite well.

      I was the sole Linux guy at my last job and had no problem deploying and maintaining hundreds of CentOS boxes between Kickstart and yum.

      And there is support. The free support is community based. But you can buy a real honest to goodness support contract with SLA's and everything.
    • They do include yum and createrepo packages. AFAIK those are the only added packages.

      This allows you to patch the systems, and even have a local repository without giving Red Hat an arm, a leg and your right lung.
  • PNALEV can't be pronounced, and it doesn't have an anatomical alternate meaning, so it's no good.

    What we need is a better acronym. So get your Super High Intensity Thinking (SHIT) ready. We need Creative Reasoning Applied to the Problem (CRAP).

  • Here. [centos.org]

  • Torrents (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kalak ( 260968 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:09PM (#11825972) Homepage Journal
    for DVD [gatech.edu]
    for binary disks 1-4 [gatech.edu]
    • Torrent information like this is good and keeps the downloads coming. FYI, those on the torrent please keep at least a 1:1 ratio going. I personally upload at a 2:1 just to be nice (aka, i dont play games)

      thanks kalak for the post

      http://tinyurl.com/6vq2z/ [tinyurl.com]

  • Note for x86_64 users (Score:3, Informative)

    by Beatbyte ( 163694 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:10PM (#11825977) Homepage
    There is NO 4.0 final release ISO files as of yet. The latest available are the 4.0 RC1 ISO's.

    You'll have to wait a bit for the new ISO's.

  • Other distros based on RHEL 4 (Score:3, Informative)

    by waynegoode ( 758645 ) * on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:25PM (#11826127) Homepage
    There are other distros based on RHEL 4. There are more at DistroWatch [distrowatch.com]. See their list [distrowatch.com] of Red Hat based distos.
    • Mod up. This is informative.

      It also is kind of sad, that there have to be a few projects to complete the same goal.

      Piebox seems to be almost the same as CentOS. Why do we need this many? Are there really that many different ideas and viewpoints in trying to make a near exact copy of something?
  • Why did they put MySQL 4.1 in here when PHP 4 doesn't even support it ( mysqli extention is in PHP 5, but not PHP 4 )?

    • Re:MySQL 4.1 with PHP 4? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Ask redhat, and you never know it might actually work, have you tried it? :)

    • Re:MySQL 4.1 with PHP 4? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Too bad you can't use google to answer your question *before* you post FUD.

      http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/old-client.htm l

      • And unfortuantely, you didn't read the full article in which you linked to.

        While the main issue is that the password ( which changing MySQL to use the old password encription type is a solution, it's a hack. I'd hope RH set thier MySQL build to do this by default ), you still lack the extra function calls the new library (mysqli [php.net]) has the the old one doesn't ( mainly to do with replication, but still handy nonetheless ).

        For me, I'd rather sit on be with PHP 4/MySQL 4 or make the brave jump to PHP 5/MySQL 4

  • Some clarifications (Score:3, Informative)

    by fief ( 12961 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @02:42PM (#11826300)
    CentOS is one of several projects that took the source rpms from Redhat and recompiled them into a working set of isos (minus Redhat copyrighted material). Whitebox Linux [whiteboxlinux.org], Tao Linux [taolinux.org], and Scientific Linux [scientificlinux.org] are some others.

    They were basically all started independantly of each other.

    Whitebox (being the only one I have really used extensively) is run out of Beauregard Parish Public Library [beau.org] by a a JMorris [slashdot.org]. He rules with a tyranical fist and has no desire to offer anything other than the bare minimum of changes needed to make the rebuild possible. Now I like this hard-line leadership, but it has caused some friction as to the timelyness of updates.

    I did recently convert a machine that was Whitebox Linux to Tao Linux to verify that it could be done. I followed this basic procedure. With this basic procedure, picking one of the projects over another isn't that much of a life or death decision. It is relatively easy to move between this projects. [centos.org]

    As far as I can tell (not having seen an actual RHEL box) both Whitebox and Tao are very accurate representations of RHEL. I have yet to see an instance where a package desigend for RHEL didn't work with Whitebox and Tao. I have installed Oracle, vmware, various rpm's that were packaged for RHEL without much troubles.

    • Re:Some clarifications (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fluor2 ( 242824 ) on Wednesday March 02, 2005 @03:28PM (#11826725)
      Allthough Whitebox is a similar project, I would like to warn people of using other projects than CentOs. Other distro's are maintained by a very small number of developers, whilst the CentOS team consist of MANY. We ran WhiteBox for a while, and when the main person behind Whitebox was at vacation, there was NO UPDATE what so ever. Read my lips.
      • I agree. I give Whitebox props for bringing this option on my radar when I was looking at deploying 25 RHES3 servers and not looking forward to the $12k forced support cost. However, CentOS is the one I'm going with for all but 3 servers which will remain RHES due to the ability to have someone to call/blame for the higher ups.
  • Man, that looks like it has to be tweaked for days or something, my eyes crossed already. Interesting project, but I dunno...how is it for a non command line guru just mashing a default install into place?
    • There is a rather simple Anaconda installer - which runs off the CD-Rom/ Dvd-Rom plus a host of other media formats ....

      go on try it - you know its good for you :D
      • well yes, it looks like you can install it, then a week of tweaking to understand it and get it to run or something. anaconda works, I am more wondering after that point. That's a lot of "if this do that" stuff in the release notes, at least that's the impression I got, that's why I asked a question for my personal parameters. I stuck at FC2 from that reason, 3 looked like I wouldn't be able to use it and this is my "on the net" machine, so no workee, no lookee up a fix easily. I'm not a programmer, once it

  • We read recently about Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage, and the solution is now to link to a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor (PNAELV).

    It looks to me like CentOS got a legal letter and instead of opening a dialogue they just capitulated right away. Why didn't they talk to the Red Hat lawyers and reach an agreement on name usage? From the letter [centos.org]:

    "Red Hat does not authorize any person to use the RED HAT marks in association with such redistribution in any fashion, except by express

    • It looks to me like CentOS got a legal letter and instead of opening a dialogue they just capitulated right away. Why didn't they talk to the Red Hat lawyers and reach an agreement on name usage?

      It's been mentioned on their mailing lists and message boards - check out the archives. Generally you need lawyers to talk to lawyers. They don't have money to hire lawyers. I don't have money to donate for lawyer fees. If you do then please approach the project leaders, I'm sure they would be willing to accept yo

  • Here is the actual Release Announcement - Editors on slashdot - please link to the Story itself....

    http://lists.caosity.org/pipermail/centos-devel/ 20 05-March/000739.html
  • The only thing I take issue with on the legal action thing is their complaint about links to their site:

    Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.

    Is even RedHat going to take issue with linking from one site to another without express permission? That thing the web was made for? It's just stupid. /rant

  • If anyone else is trying to convert people at work, please see if it is possible to take some (even a fraction) of the money you save by using CentOS over RHEL and donate it to the project.

    It's not as easy as it sounds, but doesn't stop me from trying.

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