[Bradford] Centos 6

[Alice Kaerast]

Hi,

Centos 6 was released a couple of days ago, and as many of you know
I've been looking forward to this for a while.  After a couple of days
I can give you the good, the bad and the ugly.

Good:

* Stateful IPv6 support is included in the default kernels.  This
makes a huge difference when using Centos 6 with an IPv6 tunnel and
means you can actually firewall the connection correctly.

* Some nice updates due in 6.1, including 389-ds and FreeIPA.

Bad:

* The EPEL repository, where a lot of non-core packages come from, is
built against RHEL 6.1.  This will be a major show stopper for a lot
of people as it means that a lot of software from EPEL will not work
with Centos 6.0 until either the updates come across from 6.1 or
Centos reaches 6.1.  We hit this issue today when trying to install
389-ds (an LDAP server), but it is likely to affect most packages from
EPEL.

Ugly:

* A few configuration changes have come across, for example some NFS
configuration files may need changes making.

* Centos 6.0 is considered a rolling release, with updates to 6.1
being included.  This means there is likely to be a lot more updates
than you would normally expect from a stable Centos release.  This may
not be an issue for you, but does cause more work.

* There is no upgrade path from 5.x to 6.x.  This means that to
replace Centos 5 you need to do a clean install.  This isn't a major
issue as Centos 5 doesn't reach End Of Life for almost three years
yet, and so there's no real need to upgrade to 6.x unless you already
know you need new features from it.  That said, replacing a 5.x box
with a 6.0 box shouldn't be too difficult so long as none of the above
issues affect you.

* Some ISOs are still not released.  In particular the Live CD and the
minimal install CDs are not yet available.  This is perhaps more of an
annoyance than anything, and if anybody wants a full 32bit DVD
installer (rather than downloading 4Gb) I can bring some to the LUG
social on Friday.

-- 
Alice