CentOS
CentOS ( Community Enterprise Operating System) is a Linux distribution that has on the distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL) of the company Red Hat builds. The distribution is supervised by an open group of volunteer developers, maintained and developed.
CentOS is behind Debian and Ubuntu the third most used Linux distribution for web servers.
- 4.1 Software Repositories from other manufacturers 4.1.1 EPEL
Background
The commercial Linux distribution RHEL can only be purchased in conjunction with support contracts. However, the company Red Hat provides all the source packages from RHEL on the net ready to meet the demands of different licenses - to meet free software, making it possible to develop on this basis a binary compatible to RHEL Linux distribution - included in RHEL. Due to the binary compatibility CentOS possible to use computer with a RHEL - compatible Linux distributions without a support contract with Red Hat must complete. Moreover, having regard, in addition to financial savings, the advantage is that all the software is available for RHEL, can also be used directly and without restrictions on CentOS.
On January 7, 2014 Red Hat, and gave the CentOS project announced that it is close together. Red Hat hired four of the CentOS developers and a new " CentOS Governing Board " - which both employees of Red Hat as also belong to community members - to lead the future development of CentOS.
Purpose of CentOS
The purpose of CentOS is to provide a completely to Red Hat Enterprise Linux binary compatible Linux distribution available. There is also a desired rapid response time with respect to the provision of updates and the opportunity to acquire an additional support to CentOS.
Enterprise operating system
CentOS is binary compatible with RHEL and therefore also an enterprise operating system, so an operating system that is geared to the needs of large companies and government organizations. As an enterprise operating system, therefore it is designed for durability and long maintenance cycles. You can use CentOS up to ten years of having to migrate without packages and software versions, so it is suitable for commercial use. For RHEL offer large software companies such as Oracle or SAP certificates to guarantee that their software works fine on RHEL, which also applies to large hardware manufacturer. Enterprise operating systems one finds therefore mostly on workstations and servers where a extremely stable operation is required. ( For example, in science, research, stock exchange, military or aerospace. ) Unlike RHEL is available for CentOS by most software and hardware manufacturers neither certificates nor support. However, due to the binary compatibility with RHEL, it can often take advantage of the conditions to be created for RHEL directly.
Supported Architectures
CentOS supports almost all architectures for which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available.
In the current version, it supports the following architectures without limitation:
- Intel i386 compatible x86 (32 bit ) (since CentOS 2)
- Intel x86-64 AMD64 and Intel EM64T (64 bit ) (since CentOS 3)
The following architectures are not supported by CentOS (version 6):
- X86 without Physical Address Extension (PAE )
- Intel Itanium ( 64 bit, Hewlett -Packard, SGI), CentOS 1.3 to 6.4
- IBM Mainframe (32 /64 bit, IBM S/390 and IBM zSeries ), CentOS 1.3 to 6.4
- Alpha processor ( CentOs 4.6, 64 bit, Hewlett -Packard), only CentOS 4.6
- PowerPC ( CentOs 4.6 (beta), 32 /64 bit, Apple, IBM iSeries, IBM pSeries ), only CentOS 4.6
- SPARC ( CentOs 4.6 (beta), 32 /64 bit, Sun Microsystems), only CentOS 4.6
A live CD image of CentOS is available on the project homepage. This image can be burned to a CD -ROM or transmitted using the dd command or UNetbootin to a USB stick and booted it.
Software Management
As with RHEL, CentOS is installed with a graphical installer called Anaconda, which is easy to use even for beginners. In the Software Management CentOS is based on the RPM package manager and yum software management. This uses CentOS for longer than RHEL. Applications and system components is done by finding online on a repository server, by downloading a RPM package and installed.
Software repositories from other manufacturers
Repositories from other manufacturers usually have different objectives or other licensing policy as CentOS. Noteworthy here are Dag Wieers, RPM Fusion, RPMForge and ATrpms. The sources are not always compatible with each other. In addition, more and more software projects and companies, such as the GStreamer project, Skype or Adobe Systems, the Mono project, own repositories available.
EPEL
EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a well maintained by the Fedora Project repository that provides ported packages that are included in Fedora itself, but not in RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux. Because this enterprise distributions are developed on the basis of Fedora, only very small adjustments to the packages are usually necessary. Thus EPEL extends the enterprise distributions to many there did not contain applications and drivers. Since EPEL dependent solely on the use of the community, Red Hat or Fedora Project is for EPEL packages no guarantees, support or certifications, as is common for packages in the official RHEL repository.
Problems with the version of RHEL 6
Normally upstream updates can be made (practically day period ) are available always very timely. Only in about half a year " point releases " of RHEL one is a few weeks (so far worst one to two months ) cut off of it, because the team of volunteers from CentOS then has to do a lot more.
With RHEL 6, however, seems to Red Hat " revised " to have access to the sources: While it is under the GPL, of course, still be allowed to spread this or derived therefrom binaries, but who does so, will risk his access to the "Red Hat Network " They are not your Restricting right to distribute, They Are Restricting access to your RHN if you choose to distribute.
With CentOS 6.2 seems to have open and handle all problems again. 6.2 was only available about a week after 6.1, current updates there again.