Centos 6 released

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2011-July/017645.html

by fs111 • 15 years ago

115 52 15 years ago

lists.centos.org

nodata• 15 years ago

They're still alive!

iaskwhy• 15 years ago

Can someone explain what's important here for a very basic Linode user?

nek4life2• 15 years ago

An updated version of Python amongst other updated packages. Will probably make installing certain software not so much of a pain in the rear.

boyter2• 15 years ago

Having just spent the better part of a day setting up Django on a Centos 5.5 machine I am doing a happy dance at this news. The amount of work to get things up and running is truly painful. Especially if you are on a x64 system.

shapeshed• 15 years ago

Red Hat without the licence. A stable, conservative flavour of Linux.

GaryOlson• 15 years ago

A completely reworked security framework; among other major changes. We've had a RHEL 6 installation for a few months and are still working thru the changes. Basic Linode users might want to wait unless you really need the Python updates.

viraptor3• 15 years ago

What's the point of using CentOS these days? Scientific Linux is basically compiled from the same sources and doesn't lag months behind RHEL. Did I miss something?

ghshephard3• 15 years ago

The "why" is that CentOS has brand recognition, and many who don't want to purchase an RHEL license, but want to run software that's been qualified/RPM'd for that platform, will naturally turn to CentOS.

I've been following Linux Distros for 10 Years, Have built my own LFS, have a couple slicehost servers, one linode server, and a bare metal server at Server Beach - This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux" could be used in place of CentOS.

Now that almost certainly means that I'm ignorant of something that those more clued than me would consider obvious, but, in terms of knowledge of Linux Distributions among your typical IT crowd, I'm probably in the 95+ Percentile - so you can imagine how many others out there haven't heard of Scientific Linux and just turn to CentOS without knowing better.

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

I've been building, running and configuring Debian, Fedora, Centos and RHEL systems for over a decade and I've never even heared of "Scientific Linux"

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

> The "why" is that CentOS has brand recognition

The real brand is RHEL. Otherwise people don't care much what the brand of the binary compiled Linux they are using. We switched from CentOS to SL to CentOS.

To be honest, the staff @ CERN and Fermilab inspire more confidence in their commitment to their distro than the CentOS. I understand the guys have full time jobs and do this on the side, but in the end that becomes kind of irrelevant for some new end user who is just looking for binary compatibility with RHEL.

> This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux"

Then you haven't followed the linux distros (especially RHEL binary compatible clones) close enough. SL is actually older than CentOS.

rednaught• 15 years ago

I have about the same time in Linux as you but how I found out about SL was due to the delays CentOS has been having. Previously, the CentOS releases were not far behind RHEL releases as far as timing. But when 6.0 failed to show up I visited the CentOS forum.

For whatever reason that only the internal developers know, announced milestone after milestone were delayed. The chief complaint about CentOS has been the lack of openness or transparency with the devs. Numerous offers to help and contribute to the project have not been accepted. With little feedback or request for help, users became antsy if the CentOS project was dead in the water. That's where Scientific Linux seemed to have found some new users when they were the first out of the gate with a version 6 based on RHEL.

While it's great that CentOS 6.0 is out, maybe the better question is to ask why not 6.1 which was already released by RHEL some time ago (May 19th) that addresses some security issues.

I used CentOS quite a bit but have moved off to distributions as I'm happy to pay for some software and contribute to other ecosystems where there is an openness to them.

dsheth• 15 years ago

I think the main difference is that Centos strives to be "100% binary compatible." We write software targeted to enterprise users that are generally running Redhat. Our development and test platforms are Centos.

Scientific Linux, while compiled from Redhat sources, does not strive for binary compatibility with Redhat.

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

They compile the same SRPMS after they strip the logos and Redhat references out. Yes, they add extra optional packages like OpenAFS and others, but you can just disable those repos.

devicenull• 15 years ago

The "lag" you speak of actually can be thought of as a feature. For example, you don't want doing a 'yum upgrade' to upgrade PHP from 5.2 to 5.3 and break software you are running. You want your core operating system to actually be fairly stable, and not have to worry about upgrades randomly breaking things.

When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server. Aside from security fixes, there's very little reason to upgrade software on a server just because a new version was released.

mikemaccana2• 15 years ago

Are you saying that RHEL break PHP by upgrading from 5.2 to 5.3?

That would be very strange, RHEL's reknowned for very strict binary compatibility and backporting every security fix to whatever they shipped originally. Lagging behind RHEL updates would normally just mean you're insecure / have bugs for longer.

zokier• 15 years ago

You realize that CentOS is based on RHEL which is already extremely stable and conservative in updates? Even if new CentOS was released on the same day that RHEL, it wouldn't be 'the latest and greatest software'. CentOS lagging RHEL doesn't add anything of value.

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

A 9 month lag behind RHEL is a feature? You are either misunderstanding something or just trolling.

> When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server.

It is really great when others tell me what I need to run on my server.

Just to be clear, you do know that CentOS is a binary compatible compilation of RHEL? The distro is not about adding feature or improvements or spinning their own from scratch. There is no need to wait for it to become "fairly stable" it just tracks RHEL. If RHEL is unstable, then CentOS is going to be unstable. That is the point of it. Claiming that their lag was on purpose is a little dishonest I think.

omarqureshi• 15 years ago

The lag is indeed not a feature, its due to the fact that Red Hat is an organisation with people whom are salaried, compared to the people who work on CentOS that do so for free.

veeti• 15 years ago

I haven't seen a single VPS/dedicated provider that offers SL.

mikiem• 15 years ago

M5 Hosting does offer Scientific Linux for dedicated servers: http://www.m5hosting.com/scientific-linux-dedicated-server.p... But you are correct, it is hard to find. Some dedicated server hosts will install it if you ask, but larger hosts and VPS providers might not be so eager to depart from their standard images/platforms.

mariana• 15 years ago

CentOS guarantees binary compatibility with RHEL. That's why it matters.

viraptor3• 15 years ago

So does SL. They basically compile the same SRPMs and publish the result.

sitkack2• 15 years ago

I really excited to try out the brand new Python 2.5!

sitkack2• 15 years ago

The idea of a monolithic base operating system has got to go. A machine as a unit of encapsulation wastes resources and forces a needless race towards lowest common denominator bug compatible versions of packages.

If application A needs PHP 5.2 and application B needs PHP 5.3 they should both be able to exist on a "machine" w/o resorting to complicated maintenance or having separate OS instances per app.

Witness, http://nixos.org/ a purely functional package management system. Use it either in userland or as an entire OS. You decide.

jodrellblank2• 15 years ago

Isn't this continuing the debate about centralised libraries vs. localised ones? Then you have PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 to bug fix, and new applications then need their own PHP interpreter or they add dependency crosslinks. That doesn't sound like it's getting rid of "complicated maintenance".

rwmj2• 15 years ago

Virtualization solves this. You just install two OS instances with the differing requirements, and then run it all on some super-stable host OS (RHEL 6.1 being ideal). The host OS doesn't get involved in details of what web app requires what, because that has all been pushed up to the VMs.

Edit: Yes I do implement production servers like this. Apache + mod_rpaf + mod_proxy runs on the host to act as an accelerator, cache and to direct requests to each VM webserver.

nek4life2• 15 years ago

I thought it was Python 2.6.2, no? I also realize you're being sarcastic.

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

Well you mean Python 2.6.

You are probably joking but at least 2.6 is still supported by some major projects. Many have dropped 2.4 support already (NetworkX for instance). So I am pretty exciting about 2.6 actually ;-)

jswanson• 15 years ago

Too late. Already replicated created Scientific Linux 6 cobbler repos and have started deploying.

SL seems to be much more on top of things than CentOS these days, and it was incredibly frustrating waiting for CentOS to release 6.

bcl• 15 years ago

And don't forget to check out the Extra packages from the EPEL repository - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

kzk_mover• 15 years ago

This release includes transparent large page? This will hugely increase the performance of memory-consuming applications (c,f. Redis, HBase, MongoDB, etc.). I confirmed at RHEL6.

rwmj2• 15 years ago

It's compiled from the same kernel source so it should have THP (I admit here that I've not verified this with CentOS 6). And yeah, THP is great.

Centos 6 released

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