The CentOS development team, through Karanbir Singh, announced last evening (March 31st) the immediate release of the CentOS 5.3 Linux distribution. Just like Scientific Linux 5.3, the third maintenance release of CentOS 5 is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 operating system. What’s new in CentOS 5.3? Well, first of all the software repositories were combined into a single one, which will make it easier for the end-user to update or install packages. Moreover, a new option has been added in the installer, to allow them to add third-party software repositories.

"Given the widespread requests for user contributed packages directly being hosted within the centos repositories, the contribs repository is now back with CentOS-5.3. There are no packages yet, but over the next few weeks we hope to have a policy and process in place that allows users to submit and manage packages in the contrib repo." - said Karanbir Singh in the mailing list announcement.

Among the resolved issues in CentOS 5.3, we can notice that the developers re-enabled support for the Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet controller and they managed to fix the annoying nautilus-sendto bug, which didn't let users send files via Pidgin.




Last but not least, CentOS 5.3 comes with brand new artwork (see the above screenshots for details), designed by Alain Reguera Delgado, Marcus Moeller, Ralph Angenendt and the Artwork SIG team, and lots of updated packages. For a complete list of changes or updated packages, please visit the official release notes.

About CentOS:

CentOS is a community enterprise operating system, based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources and available for the following architectures: Intel 32-bit, Intel IA-64 (Itanium 64-bit), 64-bit (AMD's AMD64 and Intel's Intel 64). Additionally, CentOS is a 100% free Linux distribution fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Download CentOS 5.3 right now from Softpedia.