CentOS 6.0 released

Seven months after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0, the CentOS developers have announced the release of CentOS 6.0. The RHEL 6.0 clone is currently only available as a DVD image for x86-32 and x86-64 systems; however, Live CDs are reportedly in preparation and the developers have also said that they plan to issue a "Minimal Install CD" in the coming days. They also intend to provide information on a "LightWeightServer (LWS) CD" that, similar to the "CentOS 4 Server CD", will contain the key components to set up a server.

Updating from CentOS 4 or 5 to version 6 is not recommended. CentOS 6 is available to download from numerous mirror servers and bit torrents (x86-32, x86-64 (direct download)). Until the release of CentOS 6.1, the project plans to provide the security updates Red Hat integrated into RHEL 6.1, as well as those that have been issued since its release, via a "continuous release repository"; further details are to follow within 48 hours of the release of CentOS 6.

The release notes state that the CentOS developers have only modified eleven of the original packages – including Firefox, Yum and the Anaconda installer; about a dozen Red Hat-related packages have been removed, such as abrt-plugin-bugzilla, redhat-release-* and various packages that provide Red Hat Network support.

CentOS 6.0 is the last of the three most popular distributions whose developers take the RHEL source packages, substitute the protected components (for example, the Red Hat logos), and after recompiling assemble the whole thing into a distribution that is said to be fully compatible with the original. Oracle released its Oracle Linux 6.0 in February, and the Scientific Linux (SL) project released its identically named clone in March. In mid-May, Red Hat released the first minor update to RHEL6, version 6.1. Oracle released a clone of this version in early June; the Scientific Linux developers are still working on theirs. The CentOS developers have not indicated a release date for CentOS 6.1.

(ehe)