CentOS 5.9 Has Been Officially Released

On January 17, Karanbir Singh has announced the immediate availability for download of CentOS 5.9, for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architecture.

CentOS 5.9 is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by the Upstream OS Provider, more precisely Red Hat. It's the ninth update in the 5.x branch of the series and comes with lot of bugfixes, updates and new functionalities.

The users can upgrade from CentOS 5.8 or from any other release in the 5.x branch. The process is simple and all it requires is to run the 'yum update' command.

Running 'yum list updates' before doing the update is recommended, so users can get a list of packages that are going to be updated. To check if you are indeed on CentOS-5.9, run : 'rpm -q centos-release' and that should return: 'centos-release-5-9.el5.centos.1'

Furthermore, if you are running CentOS 5.8 and have the CR repo enabled, a simple 'yum update' will still move your machine to 5.9. But since the CR repo already contained all the 5.9 updates, there will only be a handful of rpms that need to be installed for the 5.8 to 5.9 upgrade.

Highlights of CentOS 5.9:

• The UOP added native MySQL support to postfix. Users might consider moving from the postfix-mysql package from the centosplus repo to this package, if they are using the centosplus package only for mysql support;
• java-1.7.0-openjdk (Java 7) support has been added in CentOS 5.9. java-1.6.0-openjdk (Java 6) is still available and most things Java in the distribution still use Java 6;
• ant17 (Ant 1.7.0) has been added to CentOS 5.9. The older ant (Ant 1.6.5) is still available;
• Microsoft Hyper-V drivers have been added to allow CentOS to be more efficient as a Virtual Machine when installed on Microsoft Hyper-V server;
• A newer version of rsyslog (name rsyslog5) is included. The original rsyslog (rsyslog version 3.22) is still available and the version installed by default;
• The samba3x packages have been rebased on samba-3.6.

A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement.

Download CentOS 5.9 right now from Softpedia.