Well CentOS is officially released. Now the mailing list whining can be stopped … until at least 5.5! For new installs grab an ISO. For upgrades (which is generally safe), just run: # yum update Or if you want to be very careful: # yum clean all # yum update glibc\* # yum update yum\* rpm\* python\* # yum clean all # yum update # shutdown -r now Just read the Release Notes for more specifics, or the RHEL 5.

Recent versions of Linux and the Xorg X-Windows system have been engineered to require very little configuration settings to properly detect graphics options and display resolutions. In most cases graphics should “just work”. The Xorg system stores all its configuration options in the file: xorg.conf. Many distributions including Fedora and CentOS keep this file in the /etc/X11/ directory. In the past this file would contain a great deal of information that was not easy to setup.

When I built my server, I only used a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combination drive. Whenever I remotely downloaded a ISO using wget or bittorrent, I would have to copy the 2-4GB file(s) from my server to either my desktop or laptop. I finally caved, and bought a DVD-RW drive for my server (even though it will get minimal usage). (This was all on my CentOS 5 server, I executed these commands entirely remotely.

For those who might not be familiar with enterprise linux distributions, CentOS is a rebranded free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For enterprise usage Red Hat supports each release for 7 years, while carefully updating packages for backwards compatibility. Each .1 “point release” is an Service Pack update. RHEL 5.3 was released at the end of January. Typically it takes a few weeks for the CentOS team to repackage, build and distribute the source of RHEL into a CentOS release.

The admins running Wikipedia are almost complete in migrating their servers from a mix of RedHat and Fedora to Ubuntu. The primary reasons behind the switch, according to Brion Vibber (Wikimedia CTO), were personal preference, Ubuntu availability on the desktop and better support/stability compared to Fedora. As a server, one might think that an enterprise option like RHEL or CentOS might make for a better choice, however both of these lack the appeal of Ubuntu and the flexibility in support.