CentOS Provides 5.2 Update, Where's Unbreakable Linux 5.2?

Published: July 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The CentOS project, which creates, distributes, and supports rejiggered versions of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux operating system, has announced that it has pulled up to parity with the real RHEL 5.2 with its own CentOS 5.2 release.

Like the real RHEL 5.2, CentOS 5.2 has a new set of applications that have been updated--the Linux 2.6.18 kernel, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.1.6, Gnome 2.16, KDE 3.5, OpenOffice 2.3, Evolution 2.12, Firefox 3.0, Thunderbird 2.0, MySQL 5.0, and PostgreSQL 8.1 are the biggies that enterprises care about. The work that Red Hat has done to improve the integrated Xen hypervisor for Linux and the libvirt and Virtual Machine Manager management tools also comes in the CentOS 5.2 update.

CentOS 5.X releases are available only on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 platforms and comes in both server and desktop flavors. However, the project says that it has plans to port the operating system to Itanium, Power, and Sparc architectures in the future and in that order. (The release notes, which you can read here, say these are "planned" and will be "released soon," as betas first and then as final releases. The interesting bit about that statement is that Red Hat doesn't support Sparc processors, but CentOS is going to, and Red Hat supports mainframes, but CentOS is ignoring the big iron.) "After lots of rumors, talks, elongated and sometimes emotional discussions we have decided to not support the upstream zSeries of sub-sub-releases," explained CentOS project manager, Karanbir Singh, in the release notes. "If there is enough interest in the community for supporting this, we request people to step forward and volunteer their time and resources to make this happen. The door is very much open. We just don't have the time and resources within the project as it stands right now to be able to do the zSeries work."

The CentOS project intends to provide full updates on CentOS 5 until March 31, 2010 (between two and four per year, as conditions dictate), and will provide maintenance updates after that until March 31, 2014.

As best I can figure the supported iron listings, Oracle, the other cloner of RHEL with its Unbreakable Linux clone, is only supporting RHEL 5 and RHEL 5.1 with its service, and only for either 32-bit X86 or 64-bit X64 processors. Oracle also supports RHEL 4 Updates 4, 5, and 6 on these chops as well as on Itanium processors. Oracle Unbreakable Linux is not supported on Itanium iron with any RHEL 5 clone and does not support IBM's Power processors in any shape or form with any clone of RHEL. Ditto for mainframes. The real RHEL 5.X instances do, of course, support Itanium and Power processors in addition to IBM's mainframes. When Oracle will get its RHEL 5.2 clone out the door is anyone's guess. For all I know, it is out and the documents are not updated.

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