CentOS

The CentOS development team has announced the first beta release of CentOS 5 for i386 and x86_64. See the release notes for more information about the beta.

According to the CentOS website, "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free."

The prominent North American vendor is Red Hat, but the Red Hat legal department defends the Red Hat trademarks and requires that all mention of that trademarked name be absent from the CentOS site and software. However, it's no coincidence that CentOS releases follow closely after those prominent EL releases.

Of the various EL clones that showed up a few years ago, CentOS has done an exceptional job of attracting developers and users and keeping up with its upstream parent. Security advisories are posted regularly to the centos-announce mailing list.

CentOS supports i386 and x86_64 hardware and there are mailing lists available in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.

Looking down the road a ways it looks like there is some possibility for collaboration between Fedora and CentOS. See this thread on centos-devel which looks at the Fedora EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) project. This project is still quite young but some packages are available for download and testing. The epel-devel-list is available for EPEL development discussion.

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