14 DAY TRIAL // CentOS 5.5 has been released, the newest update to the venerable Linux distribution. Based on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, it took the developers about a month and a half to get CentOS 5.5 ready, as it is usual for the distro. CentOS 5.5 tries to stay as close to the upstream packages as possible and only removes the branding and the packages that are specific to Red Hat. As such, CentOS 5.5 includes everything that RHEL 5.5 brought new, as well as the hundreds of package updates.
“We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.5 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.CentOS-5.5 is based on the upstream release EL 5.5 and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with,” the official release announcement read.
“The i386 distro is now spread onto 7 CD iso files, while the x86_64 distro is now 8 CD isos. The x86_64 DVD set is now spread over 2 DVD isos, while the i386 DVD remains as 1 iso file,” the announcement explained.
As with CentOS 5.4, LiveCDs are made available for both the i386 and the x86-64 architectures if you want to demo the CentOS 5.5 environment or do a network install. There are only eight new packages in CentOS 5.5, which was to be expected from a maintenance update like this. However, there are 187 updated packages in the latest release and two have been removed.
54 packages have been modified from the upstream release in order to comply with CentOS’ free software status. Finally, 11 packages present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 were removed altogether in CentOS 5.5, mostly those having to do with the Red Hat Network or other Red Hat-specific stuff. You can see all of the updates and changes in the CentOS 5.5 release notes. You can check out some of the new things in RHEL 5.5 in its release announcement.
CentOS 5.5 is available for download here on Softpedia. CentOS 5.5 LiveCDs are available for download here on Softpedia.