CentOS 5.6 brings the Ext4 filesystem mainstream

LINUX DISTRIBUTION CentOS has released a major update following in the footsteps of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, which has been updated to version 5.6.

CentOS is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the same versioning scheme as RHEL, with both distributions now on version 5.6. CentOS is essentially a free version of RHEL built with the same packages as Red Hat's commercially supported version but without the Red Hat branding.

While Red Hat released RHEL 5.6 in January, it has taken a few months for the CentOS lads to get around to removing all the necessary branding to avoid infringing Red Hat's licences. However the delay has been made worse by having to split effort between CentOS 5.6 and CentOS 6.

The big change in CentOS 5.6 is the production ready version of the Ext4 filesystem. There are also updates to Bind, GCC, Gnome, KDE, PHP, Python, Samba and many other packages.

CentOS has become popular with web hosting companies and those who like the maturity of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux but don't want to shell out for Red Hat's support. Although not as popular as Debian and Ubuntu with server jockeys and individual users, respectively, CentOS' conservative approach has seen many system administrators loading it on their client machines and servers.

The big push for CentOS will be to launch CentOS 6 based on RHEL 6. Red Hat launched RHEL 6 back in November 2010, promoting its virtualisation performance and support for 4096 processors, 64TB RAM and 100TB file systems, thanks to XFS file system support. There is no word on when CentOS will release its own take on RHEL 6.

At present, CentOS 5.6 is available for x86 and x64 architectures and there's also a LiveCD that is available for those who want to try it before they install it. For those running previous versions of CentOS, upgrading is apparently as simple as typing yum update. µ