CentOS 5.1 Released

CentOS released version 5.1 of its increasingly popular distribution, which is celebrating its fourth birthday this month. Version 5.1 includes 70 new packages native to the distribution including 17 in the series of the Yellow dog Updater, Modified (yum) package updater tools, 11 in the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (sblim) management tools and an assortment of various other packages. Updates in the distribution include Apache, php, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox-1.5 and PostgreSQL. The full release notes of the build of the distribution are available at CentOS.org.

CentOS 5.1 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It remains completely free and offers the compatibility and reliability of RHEL without the costs of build certification and support contracts. This makes CentOS a wonderful test bed or quality system that does not require the full resources (hardware, software costs, support costs) of the enterprise production builds.