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CentOS is a freely available Linux distribution which is based on Red Hat's commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, and with which it aims to be 100% compatible. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is composed of free and open source software, but is made available in a usable, binary form (such as on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) only to paid subscribers. As required, Red Hat releases all source code for the product publicly under the terms of the GNU General Public License and other licenses. CentOS developers use that source code to create a final product which is very similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and freely available for download and use by the public, but not maintained or supported by Red Hat. There are other distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux's source; CentOS is generally the one most current with Red Hat's changes (as of December 22, 2005).
CentOS uses up2date and yum to download and install updates from repositories on the CentOS Mirror Network by default while Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core obtain updates from a Red Hat Network server by default.
Versioning scheme
CentOS versions have two parts, a major version and a minor version. The major version corresponds to the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux from which the source packages used to build CentOS are taken. The minor version corresponds to the update set of that Red Hat Enterprise Linux version from which the source packages used to build CentOS are taken. For example, CentOS 4.1 is built from the source packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 update 1.
Release history
The first version of CentOS, CentOS 3 build4-rc0, was released in the end of 2003. CentOS 3.1 (version 3, quarterly update 1) was released on March 19, 2004 CentOS 2, based on version 2.1 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was released on May 14, 2004 Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4, was released for the i386 architecture [http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=71" target="_blank" >* and for the ia64 architecture on March 1, 2005.
Architectures
CentOS supports (nearly) all the same architectures as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- Intel x86-compatible (32 bit)
- Intel Itanium (64 bit)
- Advanced Micro Devices AMD64 and Intel EM64T (64 bit)
- PowerPC/32 (Apple Macintosh PowerMac running the G3 or G4 PowerPC processor) ("beta" support)
- IBM Mainframe (eServer zSeries and S/390)
There is also support for 2 architectures not supported upstream:
Distributions based on CentOS
- Boston University Linux 4.5 Server Edition (Zodiac)
- NuOnce Networks CentOS / Blue Quartz CD
- Openfiler
- Rocks, a distribution for clusters now based on CentOS
- SME Server
- Trixbox, a PBX solution
See also
External links
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"CentOS"