CentOS 6 Linux finally arrives

The clone of RHEL has finally been updated to 6.0, with 6.1 promised soon

By Source Seeker on Mon, 07/11/11 - 3:03pm.

Although Red Hat released RHEL 6.0 way back in November and the 6.1 version in May, the freebie clone CentOS, is finally now available in the 6.0 version.

The community says that its main change to RHEL is to remove Red Hat's " branding and artwork" and otherwise ensures that its project is 100% binary compatible with Red Hat's. This distro of CentOS was developed using a new build system and library checks to better ensure that 100% compatibility. Perhaps that accounts for the long, eight-month lag time behind the RHEL release.

Just like RHEL 6.0 was a big departure from 5.x, so it is with CentOS 6.0, say its creators. What can you expect in CentOS 6.0? Network World tested RHEL 6.0 in January and found it to be a lean, mean, power-conserving "virtualization" machine, using KVM, since Red Hat dropped native support for the Xen hypervisor. (Xen Dom0 has since been accepted into the mainline kernel.)

The CentOS team promises that a clone of 6.1 won't take so long. "Since upstream has a 6.1 version already released, we will be using a Continuous Release repository for 6.0 to bring all 6.1 and post 6.1 security updates to all 6.0 users, till such time as CentOS-6.1 is released itself. There will be more details about this posted within the next 48 hours," said the team. So stay tuned for word on that.

RHEL 6.1 further fined-tuned virtualization performance and network traffic performance, while offering a sneak preview of its upcoming identity services. So that's what CentOS users have to look forward to.

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About Source Seeker

The Source Seeker blog is written by Julie Bort, editor of the Open Source Subnet site as well as the Microsoft Subnet, Cisco Subnet sites. Indeed, Bort is the Online Community Editor for all of Network World. She also writes The Microsoft Update blog. If you have an idea for a blog, or a news tip on open source, Microsoft or Cisco, contact her at jbort@nww.com, 970-482-6454 or follow Julie on Twitter @Julie188.

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