The CentOS 5.2 i386 LiveCD was released by the CentOS Development team yesterday, as announced by Patrice Guay. The LiveCD is based on the CentOS-5.2 i386 distribution, and it also offers the possibility to perform a netinstall thanks to the "Network Install" option.

You can use the CentOS 5.2 LiveCD as a workstation, with the applications provided, such as OpenOffice.org 2.3.0, Firefox 3.0, Pidgin 2.3.1, Scribus 1.3.3.2, K3b 0.12.17, Gimp 2.2.13 and more.

The Live CD can be used as a rescue CD with these applications:

• memtest86+-1.65
• A complete set of LVM and RAID command line applications
• QTParted
• Nmap and NMapFE
• traceroute
• samba-3.0.28 with cifs kernel support to connect to Windows shares
• System Log Viewer
• GUI Hardware Device Manager

There are some known problems related to this LiveCD, including the fact that it cannot boot successfully from a SATA CD-ROM drive, and you will encounter some error messages you should ignore, such as:

memory for crash kernel (0x0 to 0x0) not within permissible range
udevd[xxx]: add_to rules: unknown key 'ATTRS{media}'

About CentOS:

CentOS supports the same architectures as its ancestor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, does: Intel x86- (32-bit), Intel IA-64 (Itanium 64-bit), x86-64 (64-bit, AMD's AMD64 and Intel's Intel 64), PowerPC/32 (Apple Macintosh PowerMac running the G3 or G4 PowerPC processor) ("beta" support), IBM Mainframe (eServer zSeries and S/390). Additionally, CentOS supports other two architectures not supported upstream: Alpha and SPARC ("beta" support). CentOS' preferred software updating tool is based on yum, although support for use of an up2date variant exists.

You can download this edition of the CentOS LiveCD now from Softpedia.