Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.0 was released about a month and a half ago, and it was only natural for the CentOS developers to follow suit. Yesterday it was up to Karanbir Singh to officially announce the immediate availability of CentOS 5.4. This new release comes in i386 and amd64 versions and, unexpectedly, Live disks are also available for these two architectures. Previously CentOS Live CDs were built exclusively for i386 processors and they were usually made available a week or two after the main version was released. Notably, the amd64 LiveCD weighs in at 757MB, larger than a standard CD, so it requires higher capacity optical disks.

For CentOS 5.4 the upstream package repositories have been combined into a single one, making it easier for users to manage their software sources. External package repositories can be enabled during the installation, as this feature has been added to the distribution's installer. Also, starting with this CentOS version, fast-track rpm packages will be available in the distribution's fasttrack repository, which will be populated during the next few weeks. This also means that CentOS will have a functional yum-security setup, but more details on this subject will be released on the 15th of November, 2009.

Bug fixes created for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.0 from its release until present will be incorporated into CentOS 5.4 as soon as possible, and this process should be complete Monday, the 26th of October, 2009. Issues that were apparent during the development were also fixed, like Broadcom ethernet card drivers that weren't handling Jumbo Frames properly, CIFS cleartext connection problems, m2crypto handling of subjectAltnames, wireless indicator LEDs on Thinkpad R61 laptops and other application problems.

Compared to the 5.3 release, CentOS 5.4 has 27 new packages, 266 upgraded ones, one removed and a grand total of 54 packages that were especially modified for inclusion into the operating system.

Download CentOS 5.4 right now from Softpedia. If you are only interested in testing this latest release, the Live CDs are also available on Softpedia.