At work I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but my personal stuff is served from machines running CentOS. Both distros were just bumped to version 5, bringing with them support for current components of the LAMP stack.
I care because I want Apache 2.2.4, and while it’s pretty easy to get MySQL & PHP 5 on a CentOS/Plesk box, Apache 2.2 is a bit more of a struggle.
Gary Sims at Linux.com calls the new CentOS release “a solid enterprise OS,” and points out that it includes support for virtualization, GFS2 and other clustering technologies.
Upgrading looks easy — if you’ve got physical access to the machine — but the release docs include some alternative instructions for the daring:
The best way to move from CentOS-4 to CentOS-5 is via an installer upgrade. However if you must do it online, here are some tips to help:
- Remove as many packages as you can, strip it right back to the original OS if possible
- Backup everything
- Disable all repositories, except the centos-5 OS and Updates repos
- init 3
- shutdown as many services as possible
- download and install the centos-release-5.x rpm, which will update your yum configs
- run a yum upgade ( not update )
Now the question is when will I try it…