CentOS is based on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux source packages and shares in recent RHEL virtualization, application development, security and storage improvements. Many of the enhancements in CentOS 5.3 come in the area of virtualization, targeted largely at scalability on large host machines.
CentOS, the popular community-supported clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
reached Version 5.3 in March, some three months after its parent distribution,
RHEL 5.3, began shipping.
CentOS is based on
Red Hat's freely available Enterprise Linux source
packages. The CentOS project strips trademarked logos and other branding from
the packages before building them into a free, Linux-based operating system
that boasts binary compatibility with its parent.
CentOS 5.3 shares in RHEL's recent improvements in the areas of
virtualization, application development, security and storage. Unlike RHEL,
CentOS may be had without any subscription fees, which makes CentOS a popular
operating system option for many hosting providers and cloud computing vendors.
Can Red Hat make money off desktop Linux? Click here to read more.
Applications designed and tested to work with RHEL should work just the same
on CentOS, and security and bug-fix patches from Red Hat flow downstream to
CentOS as well. However, the distribution lacks direct support from Red Hat,
and CentOS systems can't be managed through the Red Hat Network service.
That said, with its roots in RHEL, CentOS is very stable distribution with a
relatively long support term and a generous catalog of compatible hardware and
software. In addition, the free, community-oriented status of CentOS results in
plenty of regional mirrors from which to download updates (about 80 in the United
States) as well as an active community that
provides many software packages beyond those that Red Hat ships as part of its
official distribution.
Server and desktop roles
CentOS is a great fit for server deployments, and can serve well as either a
host or guest for virtualization. As a virtualization host, CentOS defaults to
the Xen hypervisor, with Red Hat's Virt-manager utility for graphical
management. CentOS isn't as full-featured a virtualization host as VMware's ESX
Server, but I found the process of configuring a Xen host and spinning up guest
instances smoother on CentOS than on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 in my
recent tests of that distribution.
CentOS 5.3 can also work well in a desktop role, although the software
packages that ship with CentOS trail those that ship with the faster-moving
Fedora and Ubuntu Linux by a couple of years on average. For example, where the
soon-to-ship versions of Fedora and Ubuntu will include Version 2.26 of the
GNOME desktop environment, CentOS offers GNOME Version 2.16.
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