14 DAY TRIAL // CentOS 5 Live CD is now available for Intel's 386 processor's architecture. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System. Based on the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this Live CD's main purpose would be to check out if it can boot and work with a certain hardware configuration but also to test some of its features as a Workstation.
According to its developers, CentOS can also be used as a rescue CD. With this purpose in mind, it comes with a series of tools and applications such as: Full set of LVM and RAID command line tools, QTParted, Nmap and NMapFE, Graphical Traceroute, samba-3.0.23c with cifs kernel support to connect to Windows file shares, System Log Viewer or a GUI Hardware Device Manager.
The Live CD also comes with a suite of proximal use applications to better suit the needs of any user who wants to use it as workstation.
Highlights:
- OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 - Firefox 1.5.0.10 - Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 - Gaim-2.0.0 - Scribus-1.3.3 - xchat-2.6.6 - k3b-0.12.17 - GIMP-2.2.13
According to the release announcement, initially, the CentOS team had in mind the creation of a Live CD based in Fedora Live CD Project, that is writeable in all of its directories. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned and such an issue would most probably be the hard point in a future 5.1 version.
CentOS supports the same architectures as its ancestor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, does: Intel x86- (32-bit), Intel IA-64 (Itanium 64-bit), x86-64 (64-bit, AMD's AMD64 and Intel's Intel 64), PowerPC/32 (Apple Macintosh PowerMac running the G3 or G4 PowerPC processor) ("beta" support), IBM Mainframe (eServer zSeries and S/390), Additionally, CentOS supports other two architectures not supported upstream: Alpha and SPARC ("beta" support). CentOS' preferred software updating tool is based on yum, although support for use of an up2date variant exists.
You can download this edition of the CentOS LiveCD now from Softpedia.