14 DAY TRIAL // Johnny Hughes, CentOS-4 lead developer, has just announced in his latest post the availability of the CentOS 4.5 version for i386, x86_64 and ia64. CentOS distro is based on Red Hat's RHEL version and its name stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System.
Along with the 4.5 version, all the updates through May 16 have been made available in the updates repository. One can easily update his CentOS-4 version to the newly 4.5 by simply typing:
- the up2date options "--undo" and "--list-rollbacks" are now deprecated, therefore one should use "yum remove " or "rpm -e " to remove packages, or "rpm -Uvh --oldpackage --nosignature --nodigest " to revert to an older package; - new Xen kernel, now supported as a paravirtualized (PV) Guest, but it cannot be used as a dom0. Although there are some issues with erratic mouse movements in PV Guests, they are expected to be corrected in future updates. You can install CentOS-4.5 PV Guests onto CentOS-5 machines, using the CentOS-5 Xen kernel as Dom0 and the CentOS-4.5 PV Guest as DomU; - OpenOffice-2.0 has a technology preview included in the updates directory. The OOo2 preview can be installed alongside the current OOo-1.1.5 version, or alone. As this was not on the upstream ISOs, it was not included in the current ISOs either.
CentOS provide both updating tools yum and up2date. Each of them can be used to download and install additional packages along with their dependencies, and also to obtain and apply periodic and special (security) updates from repositories on the CentOS Mirror Network. CentOS like RHEL target primarily the server market, but they can also be used as an X Window System based desktop. CentOS supports the same architectures as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Intel x86, Intel IA-64, x86-64 (Intel and AMD), Power PC -beta support, IBM Mainframe) and additionally supports two other architectures not supported upstream, Alpha and Sparc - beta support.