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Although I subscribed to CentOS announce mailing list, I check CentOS’s official site every time I sit on my desk at home. After all, RHEL 5 had been released for nearly a month by now. Each every time, I was disappointed to find the CentOS 5 beta listed on the main page. Tonight, I was pleased to find CentOS 5 was released, finally, for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. The CentOS-announce mailing list post was stamped Thu Apr 12 22:36:44 UTC 2007. Up to now, I still didn’t see such a post in my gmail.

I just started torrents to download DVD iso images for both architectures. x86 for home use and x86_64 for work. It seems that many people just started too. For 32 connections over Comcast’s 6MBps (burstable to 12MBps) pipe, I have 6KBps and 9KBps for the two iso images torrent instances.

Patience is a virtue…

While waiting, I read the release notes and noted a few installation gotchas:

• “Anaconda choice of kernel on 32 bit systems. For safest first time operation, the default kernel on i386 class systems is non-PAE enabled. This causes the kernel to only be able to see around 3.2 GB of memory on most PAE enabled CPU’s. Installing/selecting the PAE kernels for booting will fix this issue. Systems known to be affected are some AMD-64 and Intel 64bit motherboards when installing the i386 distribution on it.”
• Upgrade from CentOS 3, 4, 5 beta is supported.
• Anaconda installer needs at least 128MB of memory, and will use text mode for systems with less than 256MB of memory. Graphical installer is problematic on systems with less than 512MB of memory. I guess the days when one can force a RHL7.3 to run on a Pentium 66MHZ box with 32MB of ram have long gone.

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