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CentOS 5.3 Released

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 ~ 10:11 am by Mauriat Miranda

For those who might not be familiar with enterprise linux distributions, CentOS is a rebranded free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For enterprise usage Red Hat supports each release for 7 years, while carefully updating packages for backwards compatibility. Each .1 “point release” is an Service Pack update. RHEL 5.3 was released at the end of January.

Typically it takes a few weeks for the CentOS team to repackage, build and distribute the source of RHEL into a CentOS release. Last night CentOS 5.3 release was announced. The seemingly long delay was due primarily to some personal issues within the CentOS team.

I have been running a personal server on CentOS for 1 year now and I could not be more pleased with the results. I plan to update my server tonight when I am at the console. The following are some tips I’ve read online for a smooth (and fast) upgrade:

# yum update glibc

The glibc update is due to a RHEL 5.3 known issue.

After that, I would generally do the following. This basically updates the YUM installation system first to take advantage of any improvements in a newer YUM release. :

# yum update yum rpm
# yum clean all
# yum -y update

Even though past updates have been flawless for me, please do make proper backups, and read the Release Notes for more information.



Filed under Server, Red Hat, CentOS.
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3 Responses to “CentOS 5.3 Released”

  1. kOoLiNuS Says:
    April 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am

    uhm … I did a simple 3 steps routine

    1) yum clean all

    2) yum check-update

    3) yum upgrade

    the only problem I got is with the 5.3 kernel, which goes in panic after the reboot …

  2. Mauriat Says:
    April 11th, 2009 at 11:40 am

    @kOoLiNuS:

    Most people did a simple yum update with no problems.

    Odd, I remember that for 5.2 on certain hardware. What Hw is this? I didn’t see any listing of panics on the mailing list. Have you checked the forums?

  3. kOoLiNuS Says:
    April 14th, 2009 at 9:15 am

    hadn’t the time …. serious personal problems at home so in those days I’m just keeping up the minimum of our server availability …

    ASAP i’ll post a screenshot of the error and start investigating on it, promised ;-)