CentOs 4.0 Released

fluor2 writes "The CentOS team is pleased to announce availability of CentOS 4.0. Major new features include the Linux 2.6 Kernel, SELinux, udev replacing the /dev system, Xorg, MySQL4, CyrusIMAPD, Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3. These improvements along with many more are detailed in the release notes available online. We read recently about Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage, and the solution is now to link to a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor (PNAELV).
Go ahead and download CentOs from one of their mirrors."

How similar is it?

[mogrify]

Can someone speak to the differences between Red Hat and CentOS, if any? Are there any caveats for running this in production, or as a testing box for a production RHEL server? Any missing features? Are the RPMs 100% compatible, no worries? How about customized RPMs? Is it really just as simple as RHEL4 with no support and RHN?

Re:How similar is it?

[Yonder Way]

CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the bullying tactics.

I have run CentOS for about a year now on several hundred machines and it works great. The major caveat if you're used to Red Hat is you need to work out a different patch management system since RHN/up2date isn't there. But yum is built in, and works quite well.

I was the sole Linux guy at my last job and had no problem deploying and maintaining hundreds of CentOS boxes between Kickstart and yum.

And there is support. The free support is community based. But you can buy a real honest to goodness support contract with SLA's and everything.

Re:Some clarifications

[fluor2]

Allthough Whitebox is a similar project, I would like to warn people of using other projects than CentOs. Other distro's are maintained by a very small number of developers, whilst the CentOS team consist of MANY. We ran WhiteBox for a while, and when the main person behind Whitebox was at vacation, there was NO UPDATE what so ever. Read my lips.

Re:MySQL 4.1 with PHP 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask redhat, and you never know it might actually work, have you tried it? :)

Not a big red hat fan right now

[DaveJay]

The only thing I take issue with on the legal action thing is their complaint about links to their site:

Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.

Is even RedHat going to take issue with linking from one site to another without express permission? That thing the web was made for? It's just stupid. /rant