title: CentOS 5.2 Released link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/centos-52-released/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 498 created: 2008/06/26 13:26:43 created_gmt: 2008/06/26 13:26:43 comment_status: open post_name: centos-52-released status: publish post_type: post

CentOS 5.2 Released

On the heels of the release of Update 2 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) on May 21, the CentOS project announced the release of CentOS 5.2, their fully binary compatible rebuild from the Red Hat sources, on June 24. This is a major update in many ways, not the least of which are the significant improvements in desktop applications that are part of the distribution. Firefox has been uncharacteristically advanced two major versions to 3.0, making many of use who rely on CentOS as our primary desktop very happy. It also jumps to OpenOffice.org to v2.3, which supports OpenDocument (ODF) format as the default. There are other tweaks and improvements in usefulness that are more incremental, but nonetheless extremely welcome. See the latest Release Notes for details. Here’s a screenshot from my workstation, just before I pull the trigger.

Notice the total size of the bits to be installed is 686M, making it probably worth your while to download the latest respin DVD for any new installs from here on.

It was also recently announced at the Red Hat Summit in Boston that Red Hat will be extending support of currently supported releases for an additional year, so that instead of support ending in 3 years, it will go to 4 years. Dag has a nice article on this development, that is good news for everyone who runs RHEL and RHEL-derived distributions like CentOS. Here’s a slide from Dag that illustrates the impact on CentOS’s build of RHEL:

One of the main reasons I switched from Fedora to CentOS as my primary O/S on both work and home workstations, as well as the home laptop, is that the latter has proved incredibly stable over time — as well it should, given that its basically the same O/S Red Hat sells premium subscription support for to huge global companies. Recent releases of RHEL (and by derivation, CentOS) have also been more aggressive in delivering advanced technology like NetworkManager allowing for less painful wireless connection management.

With this extension of support, even the CentOS 4 virtual machines I’m running for software testing will continue to have updates available for as long as I’ll need them. One factor in Red Hat’s decision may unfortunately be the inexplicable failure of many commercial hardware and software vendors to certify their products on RHEL 5, forcing most enterprises to continue running RHEL 4 longer than we (enterprise sysadmins) would have liked. Of course they (these plodding commercial vendors) may think that since their market is going to be dominated by open source in a few years anyway, there’s no point to reinvesting profits in their products more than absolutely necessary to keep companies from buying support from them. Which, equally unfortunately, may be a really long time. I know shops that are still running big deployments Solaris 7 or Windows 2000 (a few even on NT 4!) across their data centers. So tolerance for outworn operating systems is apparently very high.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo