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.

awesome comeback by CentOS

[rubycodez]

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

Re:

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I would hope CentOS could keep up with a minor version update. CentOS was sluggish getting a major update out the door (6.0) which was understandable at the time.

I would much rather have them get it right than them get it first.

Re:

[jythie]

That is one of the reasons I have stuck with CentOS over the years. I have found they strike a good balance between being reasonably up to date while still being pretty conservative and thus stable.

Re:

[rubycodez]

do you have any idea how much changes in a "minor version update" for redhat? that's not a trivial task.

Re:

[Revotron]

Your troll is bad, and you should feel bad!

Centos is awesome!

[Openstandards.net]

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

Re:

[jpschaaf]

Nah, Scientific Linux is better :-) And don't forget Oracle's Linux.

Re:

[fazey]

cp -Rf / /mnt/sdb2 find /mnt/sdb2 -name '*.jpg' | xargs -l rm -f echo "Oracle Linux" > /etc/redhat-release Yeaaa oracle linux man....

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle's big features are their 'Unbreakable' kernel (okay, I don't really know what that means) and they support kernel upgrades w/o a reboot.

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Too bad it is from Oracle and you then are dealing with their support staff.

I would rather reboot everyday than deal with that.

Re:

[Hatta]

How does it surpass Debian?

Re:Centos is awesome!

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:

[jez9999]

On the other hand, loads of free software is a PITA to get running on a Redhat-based distro and most tutorials tend to have Debian install instructions but not Redhat ones. I'm pretty glad I switched to Debian.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

There's plenty of arguments for each, which is why I'm glad that we have so many Linux distributions. These days it's not too horrible to run another Linux in a virtual machine, either, to catch those cases where it's just too much pain to get software running right on your machine.

I run Ubuntu on my desktop for the same reason (availability of instructions) because while I do sometimes enjoy figuring things out, I also often enjoy it when someone else has done it for me. But Debian has numerous places arou

Re:

[Lumpy]

Debian rocks for Desktops.

But RH really owns the enterprise server side. all server software is available as a brain dead easy install under RHS or CentOS

Re:Centos is awesome!

[morcego]

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.
 

Re:Centos is awesome!

[kthreadd]

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.

Re:

[morcego]

Exactly. The philosophy is completely different, to a point there is simply no way to compare. Which one is best? My answer is always "For what?".

Anyway, RH is not really worried about the version numbers. They are more worried about compatibility and certifications, which makes sense since they are a commercial distribution, and vendor (software and hardware) certifications are a big part of it.

Re:

[Patch86]

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.

Just out of interest, but why use Debian on a desktop if those are your problems? Ubuntu LTS is Debian derived (obviously) and fully supported, but is based on (I believe) a mix of Debian Testing and Unstable packages. More or less every Debian compatible package is also ported to Ubuntu.

Debian Stable is great for long-term investment server and terminal hardware precisely because it's stable and doesn't change- you know if it worked when you installed it, it'll work forever. For top user experience on end

Re:

[kthreadd]

There are good and bad things with every distribution and overall we are very happy with the quality of Debian. Apart from the kernel we have very few issues with it. Ubuntu is an interesting alternative and we have used it occasionally. One of the things that Ubuntu does better is that they backport the kernel for each successive release back to the LTS, so you can get new drivers even if you want to stay on that branch. Right now it's not a serious problem for us and we're not looking into switching away

Re:

[kthreadd]

They do, but we have found that it's unfortunately not as well maintained as the stable kernel. So we try to be more selective about which hardware we buy.

Re:

[Hatta]

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 it's like Debian Stable then?

Re:

[morcego]

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 it's like Debian Stable then?

No, not really. There are already a few others posts on this thread on the subject.

Re:

[tywjohn]

Sounds exactly like Debian Stable

Re:

[emblemparade]

You just compared the two, and did it well, too. ;)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm using software that is certified to be used on RHEL, I can usually get away with CentOS / Scientific Linux. It wouldn't fly on Debian.

Other than that, personal choice.

Re:

[dbIII]

How does it surpass Debian?

Some commercial software providers with very limited testing will be aware that it exists and won't instantly blame your choice of OS when you have problems with their software. Otherwise it doesn't. Yum versus apt-get is as silly as a vi versus emacs argument.

Re:

[goblinspy]

We do the same too.

Re:

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I use Scientific Linux but recommend both.

Isn't CentOS on a higher version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently running (according to 'cat /etc/centos-release') - CentOS Release 6.3 (Final)

So - 5.9 would be quite a bit backwards. In fact, the server it's running on was running 6.0 for the first few months of building and shaking it out before I put it on the web, and that was right around January 2012 - over a year ago.

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Centos 5 is still getting updates. It is a previous version.
You should probably know that if you are running more than one of these machines.

Any progress on the file system front?

[JDG1980]

IMO, one of the drawbacks of Linux (including CentOS) as a server OS compared to FreeBSD is the lack of a good file system. FreeBSD (and Solaris) have ZFS which has robust checksum and parity features, while Linux has nothing of the kind, at least not yet. Has any progress been made on this front?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Btrfs is coming along, but is not yet there unforetuneately. But it will probably be somwhat usable in production in a couple of years or so.

One of the solutions that we're thinking of right now is to run Zfs-On-Linux on Ubuntu. The license terms of ZFS basically means that we can't ship ZFS and Linux together as one composed system; however nothing prevents you from installing it yourself.

Re:

[buchner.johannes]

You can compile on another server (e.g. the testing system). Look at the BINHOST documentation.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

We want our servers to spend CPU time on delivering web pages and handling transactions; not recompiling the system.

I don't use Gentoo on web servers (only embedded) but if I did, the time it takes to compile a package at 2AM wouldn't be my concern (assuming I wasn't using the Gentoo binary distribution). It's not 1995 anymore.

Re:

[Sulphur]

We want our servers to spend CPU time on delivering web pages and handling transactions; not recompiling the system. I guess Gentoo is good if you're not actually using your systems for anything.

If you are installing on a number of machines, Gentoo has quickpkg which makes tarballs with the configure scripts that install rapidly.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using ZFS on Linux for around a year now. Works just fine. I'd say your information is a few years out of date.

Re:

[0123456]

I tried ZFS after mdraid decided to flag the good disk in my RAID as bad and the bad disk as good, but I couldn't get NFS exports to work because it's a user-space file system.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

They work fine for me, using the normal nfs-kernel-server/samba packages. Don't use the ZFS nfs/smb options though, not sure if that is even supported.

Re:

[devman]

You need to use ZFS On Linux, which runs as a kernel module. ZFS-FUSE is the other Linux implementation which runs in user-space.

Re:

[lister king of smeg]

Or when sun/oracle decided to open source solaris they should of licensed it under an existing license rather than make up there own.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the result is pretty clear, ZFS is included in BSD-licensed operating systems while it is not in GPL-restricted operating systems.

Re:

[JDG1980]

That article is almost entirely political bullshit, and says very little about the actual merits of ZFS as a filesystem (which are now well-verified, even if that wasn't the case in 2006).

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

lmgtfy [lmgtfy.com]

CentOS is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!

Re:CentOS is awesome

[fnj]

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.

Re:

[fnj]

Not sure what the question is, but CentOS ver x, Scientific Linux ver x, PUIAS ver x, Fermi ver x are for all practical purposes each IDENTICAL to RHEL ver x. Not quite as sure about ClearOS and Oracle EL

RHEL 6 will have:
* full security patches, bug fixes, streamed minor releases, new hardware support, and some software enhancement up to the middle of the 6th year;
* full security patches and bug fixes through the end of the 10th year

So there is absolutely no reason to sweat it until at least 2016 and possib

Re:

[unixisc]

How is Mageia, since that is Mandriva, but w/ KDE as the default, instead of GNOME (which is still available)? Clear OS has no default, while OEL goes w/ GNOME (or else, they may have changed the UX of Solaris as well). That would be very similar, except for the use of the urpmi variation to RPM

Re:

[fnj]

Mandrake's urpmi paralleled yum, not rpm. Just like SUSE's yast. Both used the same bottom layer as Redhat: rpm. The layer running above rpm is the one that does automatic dependency handling. It's like apt vs dpkg on Debian, Ubuntu, et al.

I was very impressed with boxed Mandrake (later Mandriva, later Mageia) quite a few years ago when it was still a French product built by people who knew what they were doing. I liked it largely because of urpmi (I don't think Redhat even had yum back then) and a good cen

Re:

[prefect42]

Systemd isn't enough of a reason to jump distro, and gnome3 is no reason at all for servers. I'll be sticking with RHEL because they seem to employ bloody good developers who provide ace support to users of their software, and I don't just mean paying users.

What am I missing?

[inject_hotmail.com]

CentOS 5.0 release: April 2007
CentOS 6.0 release: July 2012
CentOS 5.9 release: January 2013...wait, what?

Did I miss something?

At least they're not cutting off update support for an older version...that's kinda nice to see...I don't think many people were waiting on the edge of their seat for it though...

(I use CentOS exclusively on my hosting servers/as guest OSes and think it's great)

Re:What am I missing?

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:

[bsDaemon]

6.0 broke off around 5.4, but had a lot of newer stuff in the base. However, security updates and maintenance patches are still released for the 5.x series because, frankly, getting what you need on the system you already have is a lot easier than changing a whole lot just to get something you might want. Sure, on the privacy of your own workstation or non-production server, jumping major versions is no big deal, but on a production server, it can often times be more trouble than its worth.

Essentially, if

Re:

[bsDaemon]

I didn't say that it was based off 5.4, although I see how it sounded like that. The use of Fedora has a technical staging ground is in large part why there is no simple upgrade path to 6.x from 5.x.

Re:

[idontgno]

And more to the specific technical point, there's no easy, supported migration path from 5.x to 6.x.. The Centos Wiki howto page [centos.org] states with discouraging repetetiveness "A fresh install is generally strongly preferred over an upgrade. "

This, plus a host of not-very-specific "gotcha" warnings, and the entire guide ending with "Good luck", pretty much guarantees only the masochistic or the suicidally brave will undertake an upgrade-in-place to 6.x, rather than just staying with 5.x and picking up the point up

Re:

[greg1104]

My 5.x -> 6.x migration is hosting the 6.x one in a VM. When that works perfectly, I'll extract the image over the existing root disks (after a backup of course).

Re:

[idontgno]

And that's a great plan, but in truth, the hardware refresh is the major point. The old server is an ancient 32-bit beige box that's probably tottering on its last legs, and power-hungry to boot. As an example of how ancient, your VM idea wouldn't work too well, since the CPU doesn't have any virtualization hardware features. With this creaking hardware, the native OS runs slowly enough as it is. A VM would be correspondingly sluggish.

So, yeah, I'm doing a HW refresh, and the OS refresh is just a convenienc

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

"And more to the specific technical point, there's no easy, supported migration path from 5.x to 6.x.. The Centos Wiki howto page states with discouraging repetetiveness "A fresh install is generally strongly preferred over an upgrade. "

So in other words, we're talking here about major versions (5.x and 6.x), while minor versions (the .x) are still being upgraded for 5, so you don't have to start over with 6.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

RHEL 5.x has not reached its EOL.

RHEL5 EOL extended to March 31, 2017 [redhat.com]

Re:

[Rob_Bryerton]

They are 2 separate, currently supported distros; RHEL 5.x runs kernel 2.6.18-x and RHEL 6.x runs kernel 2.30.x IIRC (please correct me...haven't looked at RH6.x in several months).

Anyway, think of it like say Windows Server 2003 & Windows Server 2012 as 5.0 and 6.0, and the 5.1, 5.2..5.9/6.1..6.3 as service packs. Similar concept really.

Re:

[Rob_Bryerton]

Crap, I meant RH6.x runs kernel 2.6.30-x...

backdated announcments

[Anonymous Coward]

Their rpm announcements were all back dated.

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

Re:backdated announcments

[dustwun]

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 [centos.org]

OL

[freshlimesoda]

Oracle Linux 5.9 release too a day before.. whatever significance that may or may not carry ..cheers!!

Re:

[rklrkl]

Because you have servers you installed 5.X on a few years back and are still in service. Hence, 5.9 is most welcome for those and a lot easier and less risky than trying any sort of upgrade to 6.X. In fact, Red Hat/CentOS specifically warn *against* trying any sort of warm upgrade between major OS releases because of the high likelihood of borkage.

Probably the best way to upgrade to 6.X is to get new boxes, set them up like the old 5.X boxes (import any data from the old boxes obviously) but with 6.X instea