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CentOS - The Community Enterprise Operating System

CentOS is a distribution based on source RPMs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and strives to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL. Packages are changed to remove Red Hat branding and artwork, to avoid trademark infringement, but the distribution is otherwise compatible with RHEL for users and organizations who wish to run a RHEL compatible distribution, but do not have a need for outside support from Red Hat.

Installer and packaging system

CentOS utilizes the Anaconda installer used by RHEL, which provides a text-mode and GUI installer. The text-mode installer offers most of the same options provided by the GUI installer, but works better in some cases for server installation.

Like RHEL, CentOS utilizes RPM for package management, and the Yellowdog Updater Modified (YUM) for automatic updates, and easy package installation, upgrades, and removal.

Because CentOS uses source RPMs from Red Hat to build its packages, there is a slight delay in releasing security and bugfixes between the time that Red Hat releases the package and CentOS issues its package. According to the CentOS FAQ, the goal is to have RPMs out within 72 hours of the upstream release and a 24-hour turnaround is considered normal.

Derivative distros

While not as popular as Debian and other distros, CentOS has also served as the foundation for a few specialty distributions.

The trixbox distribution, a PBX distribution that uses the Asterisk software, is built on CentOS. Another PBX distribution, Elastix, is also built on CentOS and uses Asterisk.

Since its 4.0 release, the Rocks Clusters distribution, which is a Linux cluster distribution, has been built on CentOS.

Supported platforms

The hardware platforms supported by CentOS vary by release. You can install CentOS 5 on x86 and AMD64 systems, and support is expected for Itanium, PowerPC, and Sun SPARC processors at a later date. CentOS 4 is available for x86, AMD64, and Itanium, with beta releases available for PowerPC and Alpha.

The CentOS 3 release is supported on x86, AMD64, Itanium, and S/390 machines.

See the CentOS product specifications page for more information on platform support, including the maximum number of CPUs supported on each platform by release, and the maximum memory and filesystem sizes.

On x86 hardware, CentOS requires at least 128MB of RAM for a non-GUI installation, and at least 1.2GB of disk space.

If you're interested in installing CentOS, see the mirrors page for the mirror closest to you, or a Torrent link to download the distro via BitTorrent.

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