CentOS 6.5 released | Hacker News Reader

CentOS 6.5 released

lists.centos.org

75 pointsstock_toaster42 comments

More info from upstream:

Press release - https://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/11/red-...

Release notes - https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_E...

Technical notes - https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_E...

> ECDSA Support in OpenSSL: Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is a variant of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) which uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Note that only the nistp256 and nistp384 curves are supported.

> ECDHE Support in OpenSSL: Ephemeral Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDHE) is supported, which allows for Perfect Forward Secrecy with much lower computational requirements.

(Pleasantly) surprised to see docker in there.

Looking forward to 7 (although XFS by default got me wearing my best surprise! face).

XFS? Come again?

RHAT has stated that XFS will be the default filesystem in RHEL 7.

No kidding. That's an interesting choice, I like XFS but it always seemed to be best on dedicated data storage volumes rather than root disks. Did they explain why?

Interesting. I've been using XFS only (even for /boot) for years and it's been completely reliable. I'm sure it will work well for them.

Noob question here: what are the advantages of XFS over the more "default" Ext4 or the more "everything you might ever need" ZFS?

Scaling up in disk size, mostly.

Let Dave Chinner tell you: https://archive.org/download/Linux.conf.au2012ConferenceVide...

Was hoping for something I could read rather than watch.

Try https://lwn.net/Articles/476263/ then, which is a summary of Dave's talk on the state of XFS.

The TL;DR version would be that XFS aims to be get out of your road and provide a big, fast pipe to make optimal use of your available hardware. It does not try to implement end-to-end checksumming, thin provisioning, RAID, data de-duplication, or other overhead.

Dave makes the point that traditionally people characterised XFS as for very high-end workloads, but suggests that commodity hardware is now at the point (in terms of IOPS and transfer rates) that "high end" is now quite affordable, so you should consider it for workstations, laptops, etc.

The XFS authors think it will remain a better choice for certain workloads, such as the modify-in-place work of databases, video editing, and so on, that copy-on-write filesystems like ZFS and btrfs.

XFS is better than ext4 when:

1) You need huge filesystems (like 100TB+). 2) You need huge numbers of files per directory (in particular, XFS is much faster at creating the files). 3) You have a workload heavily skewed toward streaming data off the disk.

ZFS does 1 & 3 well. Not as good on 2. And it's less mature on Linux than the other 2. But ZFS also has much more robust data integrity feature than either ext4 or XFS.

P.S. - I migrated most of my stuff from XFS to ZFS this year after many years of using XFS (back when IRIX was a thing). P.S.S. - Never run XFS without battery backup and make sure to force sync data to disk periodically.

Awesome - an OpenSSL package with TLS 1.2 support was something that I've really been wanting for a long time! I was starting to think I'd have to wait until CentOS 7!

Can someone help me out with centos? When it comes to linux I'm usually running ubuntu. Why would I look to centos over fedora?

Because it is essentially redhat without the license fee. If you are in enterprise space and all that vendors certify for their software is RHEL, chances are very high it will work well on CentOS.

So...do they contribute back upstream? Or are you telling me the benefit is that they're a free rider?

My understanding is that CentOS essentially takes the RHEL packages and removes the trademarks (the RH logo and name).

Entirely legal and ethical under the GPL, and RH benefits from all the folks who know the RHEL system because of exposure to CentOS - when they're recommending a supported version of Linux, it's likely to be RHEL.

Many bugs reported in CentOS summarily get reported back upstream too, from what I understand. I imagine this helps improve overall quality as well.

They simply repackage and rebrand RHEL, then give it away for free. If anything I'd be quicker to call RHEL the free rider on the hundreds of pieces of OSS software they use (but I do not make that argument).

If you want a warranty/support contract, definitely purchase RHEL. If you don't need that, but want enterprise grade stability and compatibility, use CentOS. If you want to run Linux on your laptop, don't use either.

> (but I do not make that argument)

That's good because given the amount of code Red Hat contribute back to the community, including buying proprietary tools and open sourcing them, you'd look like a complete idiot.

> If you want to run Linux on your laptop, don't use either.

Actually CentOS 6.4 has been the most reliable thing on my Lenovo T61, T400 and Dell T3500. Everything works from hibernate, sleep, WiFi, SAS, SSD's out of the box with no configuration.

This is the polar opposite of Ubuntu, Debian stable, Debian testing and Mint which are royal bastards to get off the ground.

>Mint

Never again. Always seemed laggy. I just loaded Scientific Linux 6.3 on 3 old thinkpads this past weekend. As you said, everything works. No "sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf", no modprobe & ndiswrapper. Red Hat was my first peek at linux, so I'm a tad nostalgic (remember 9.1? crux, luxi sans?).

There is a super useful guide for the final polish on a EL6 system (extra repos, Flash, VLC, ..) here: http://astr.tohoku.ac.jp/~akhlaghi/newlinux.html

I think if CentOS were selling support contracts, that would be pretty bad. RedHat makes their money on support contracts. By using CentOS, you're more likely to switch to RedHat when you need to pay for a bunch of support.

It feels a little bit more moral to load CentOS on a bunch of systems, than to load Red Hat on them and only pay for one support contract. As an analogy, Microsoft probably prefers people to pirate Windows than to switch to Linux/Chromebook.

It's been a while since I looked, but I believe a few CentOS developers get paid by redhat, or if not, at least have alternate @redhat.com addresses. My impression has always been that CentOS and Red Hat have a good enough relationship that CentOS would not want to jeopardize that. Additionally, Red Hat benefits from having one of, if not the most common server distro (the numbers are hazy) based on their product.

The truth is, Red Hat is the only linux distro I can think of (besides maybe SuSE, but I don't know much about it) that has really made a significant push to take over the enterprise market from Microsoft (and now they've moved to trying to do the same thing to VMWare).

Note that Oracle is/was doing the same thing (repackaging RHEL) with "Unbreakable" Linux, and they are selling support for it. They also offer their "own" kernel.

Last I checked (and this was a long time back), Oracle is actually re-spinning CentOS. Edit: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/72012.html

Long-term stability.

Fedora stops supplying you with any updates after ~1.5 years, RHEL (and theoretically CentOS) will support you for 10 years. Not only this but the software gets through extremely vigorous QA, certifications etc, unlike Fedora (and many other distros).

Fedora is the development workhorse from which RHEL versions are spawned and hardened.

In short, want to run a mission critical application for many years? Go RHEL (or CentOS if you do not care about support and extra bits or cannot afford it). Want more bleeding edge stuff and faster paced development and updates? Go Fedora.

It's worth pointing out the EPEL repository that makes many of the bleeding edge packages from fedora available to RHEL in a fully compatible way.

"mostly" compatible way. You occasionally get shot so test them on another box first.

I use CentOS over Fedora because it's very stable and has a great support. Most distros that I've used crushed on me, fairly frequently compared to CentOS. CentOS and RHEL just seems very polished to me. I do run it as desktop on one of my machines but it's more of a server distro. I like Gnome2 too and I can't stand Fedora's Gnome3, it just gets in the way. One major draw back is software updates, they are a bit behind. But for the server I think its excellent. I'd compare Ubuntu to Fedora and CentOS/RHEL to Debian. Come to think of it, you can have extra repos on CentOS, like rpmforge and rpmfusion for newer software. I personally like CentOS.

If you like CentOS on the desktop, check out my project "Stella", aims to help exactly with that kind of thing. :-)

http://li.nux.ro/stella/

The problem with Fedora is that it is bleeding edge - and can be a bit unstable. So they let things go into Fedora, wait a year or two for it to stabilise and get the bugs worked out, and then it goes into RedHat/CentOS.

That is, at least for major versions of software - they constantly update packages with security fixes that might come out, and continue this for years. This means even backporting security fixes from newer releases.

So you use CentOS when you don't mind packages being a little old, but want a very solid system with long term security updates (and there are the Software Collections coming out which let you get newer versions of certain things - like Postgres which is still 8.4 in the stock install)

You shouldn't, unless you are running a server and wants to install it once and only do as small upgrades as possible.

For the following reasons:

Documentation is unsurpassed, it's very fast, it's pretty light weight, supported for a decade, stable ABI, completely hassle free, good OOB configuration, good 3rd party package support, available everywhere.

CentOS is one of many distributions built from RHEL sources.

You use RHEL or it's derivatives for a series of reasons which all orbit around the same theme: supportability.

Red Hat works with major software and hardware vendors (especially 'enterprise' software and hardware) and with that you get official support between OS/Software/Hardware.

Red Hat releases stay viable for years and years so that the software you write will keep working with the same OS for years and years – OS updates won't kill software that used to work, and the setup you create will continue to work for quite a long time.

Red Hat keeps on top of security problems, fixes them quickly, and tells you about them in a professional manner.

Rogue hackers, brand new start-ups, and the like are very often much more interested in the latest and greatest thing and _not_ the long haul. Red Hat is conservative with what's new and popular focusing instead on maintainability and supportability.

when will python get updated (at least to 2.7.5)? I read the RLN but all I see are fixes being backported from newer versions of python.

Check out "software collections", the "scl" command

Edit: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2013-1238.html

The basic python package will never change versions, but it will receive backports, this is the RedHat way.

If you must use newer stuff, check the Software Collections (still in devel, but prolly very usable):

http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/SCL/

Alternatively check out IUS repo, it has python 2.7.5 and 3.3: http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/6/SRPMS/rep...

http://iuscommunity.org/pages/About.html

With RHEL 7.

Updated my DO droplets now. No problems reported other than I was an idiot and forgot to "chkconfig dovecot on" on my IMAP server. Doh!

Doing laptop this evening.

mingw-gcc deprecated? What's the replacement, mingw-w64 -m32?

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