CentOS 5.2 Release Notes

Contents

Translations
Introduction
Install Media and sha1sum
Known Issues
Resolved Issues
Packages and Applications
Community Involvement
Further Reading
Thanks

1. Translations

Translations of these release notes are available for the following languages :

Brazilian Portuguese (português do Brasil) - Cleber Paiva de Souza
Chinese (漢語) - Hao Xu
Czech (Česky) - David Hrbáč
Dutch (Nederlands) - Tim Verhoeven
French (Français) - Patrice Guay, Fabian Arrotin
German (Deutsch) - Marco Witte, Ralph Angenendt
Japanese (日本語) - Akemi Yagi, Taira Hajime
Korean (한국어) - YoungHoon Park
Romanian (Română) - Manuel Wolfshant
Russian (Русский) - Nikolay Ulyanitski
Spanish (Español) - Alain Reguera Delgado, Ernesto Pérez Estévez
Turkish (Türkçe) - Osman Aksit

2. Introduction

Welcome to the CentOS 5.2 release. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by our Upstream OS Provider (UOP)¹.

CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is a Free Operating System. The CentOS Project is now accepting donations using PayPal, please see our website at http://www.centos.org for more details. All donations to this project are used to cover bandwidth and development costs.

CentOS 5.2 is the second update to the CentOS 5 distribution series. It contains a lot of bugfixes, updates and new functionality. Before reading any further we advise you to read the UOP release notes at http://www.centos.org/docs/5/. The rest of this document is an addendum, and primarily covers CentOS-specific issues.

3. Install Media and sha1sum

-----------------------------------------------
i386 ISOS and their sha1sum's are :

9e8da103db2217f10e07b0387edce09395723cbf  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1of6.iso
e9d0a51d638caf1ed3adde834672d0f6a82cfd92  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-2of6.iso
1c120526624e0dda4800abc5548e88937b12aabb  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-3of6.iso
d774cf3bf6a28007e94969eea9dda44b95a5c249  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-4of6.iso
c4a94ebf2636e4868c2f72945dabe4a27c3f8301  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-5of6.iso
0dc6131171739709722e6c0a53953484f7940aec  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-6of6.iso
c89db7f5294465d593e7b02c232e0e9070111487  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-DVD.iso
30e212aacb1980445f2d9e683c1d18ddb02d0974  CentOS-5.2-i386-netinstall.iso

-----------------------------------------------
x86_64 ISOS and their sha1sum's are :

94ca211d953bfafe010e9967d16e0380e0705845  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-1of7.iso
db1c88d5d699e1b65f11b39d830775df51b46a61  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-2of7.iso
4bec7760de0766e4500a2a28a4aa5d0f1b1ee757  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-3of7.iso
8f457db8454bfce9d2313808141f81aae6566294  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-4of7.iso
947ffb4f1828e995111f8d457e0ac7e795cc1080  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-5of7.iso
22155d06cc5a1b13cd52f2f9a19915b1340871df  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-6of7.iso
02fdbc48e789e4a6b7849028402f9ff03a75036c  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-7of7.iso
3e4bfcee28ec1c733e2726f23862910332b5195f  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso
10c0edba48bcd71f52f5941cbb6e50133c158345  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso

-----------------------------------------------
Torrent files and their sha1sum's are :

aacb74578a98593ceabeab5c99b5ff3a1c27c72a  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.torrent
b5e512bd4ed3671b90711ac04d6b38423d6d7ae9  CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-1to7.torrent
67ccaf21b9620f695a06e437cb695df5cfc23f7b  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1to6.torrent
66263514382ed8b726ff94ec84bea149ec53c5f0  CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-DVD.torrent

4. Known Issues

The graphical installer is for systems with over 512MB of memory. Using the graphical installer on systems with less than 512MB may cause problems.
During an graphical install it may happen that the Next does not seem to work if you keep the mouse pointer above it. In that case it is required to move the pointer away from the Next button and re-enter it before you can click it.
The anaconda installer needs at least 128MB of memory to work, and will only use text mode if the system has less than 256MB of RAM.
You will need at least 768MB of combined RAM+SWAP to use the yum included in 5.2 (for yum > 3.2.x).
When you select a lot of packages during a install the amount of memory required and the time to process the dependencies increases. So it is advised that on slower systems or systems with limited memory you do a minimal installation and use yum afterwords to install any missing packages.
If you are doing automated kickstart installations, make sure the filesystems are big enough. Anaconda is known to crash if they are to small.
Selecting the Extras repository during installation requires that you have a working internet connection. If not Anaconda may hang trying to reach the internet. If you are not performing a network install and have selected the Extras repository then Anaconda will ask you to configure a network interface so that it can reach the internet.
A kickstart installation that attempts to use the repo directive (where that repo points to an updates repository) may fail to properly install. This is because the dependency order returned by such a repo is totally wrong. Normally glibc and coreutils must be included in the first packages installed, because they include ldconfig and necessary utilities for RPM %pre and %post scripts; this requirement is not met with a repo installation.
Kickstart scripts that worked for 5.0 and/or 5.1 may have issues on CentOS 5.2 installation trees. So first test your kickstart scripts with CentOS 5.2 before using them in production.
The former installonlyn yum plugin is now built into yum. You must add the variable installonly_limit = # (where # is the number of kernels you want to maintain installed when a new kernel is installed) to your yum.conf file in CentOS 5.2. The default if nothing is added is 3 kernels. This will need to be updated even if you have the current plugin turned off or set to a different number as it does not happen automatically.
The gtkhtml3 package has been rebased in 5.2, this means that the ABI for it has changed. We recommend that all software built using gtkhtml3 be recompiled using the new packages; however, CentOS is including a compat-gtkhtml3 package in CentOS-extras for software that can not be recompiled.
The nss_ldap package is broken with bash 3.2 (command substitution) as called out in bz448014 (upstream). This issue causes substitution errors and prevents su - <any_ldap_user> from working. If the nscd service is running it will fix the problem, as will the RPM nss_ldap-253-12.el5.centos.<arch>.rpm in our Testing Repository.
The luci package requires that the package bc is installed, but it is not called out as a require. You may need to manually install bc if you want to run luci. This issue has been filed as the following bugs: bz450854 (upstream) | #2881 (CentOS). This is only an issue on minimal installs which don't install the redhat-lsb package.
There is a bug when upgrading bind-chroot where the bind update overwrites any of the user's custom settings like ROOTDIR=/some/other/path with the default ROOTDIR. See this bz451450 (upstream) for details.
The internal web browser component (Window->Show View->Other->General->Internal Web Browser) in the eclipse package does not work anymore in CentOS 5.2. Due to the update from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 3.0 the libgtkmozembed package got replaced with the xulrunner package. The library libswt3-gtk2 which provided the embedded mozilla component for eclipse does not have a xulrunner replacement yet. See this bz452113 (upstream) for details.
There is a problem with circular obsoletes between the following new files: mstflint, perftest, tvflash replacing these old files: openib-mstflint, openib-perftest, openib-tvflash. The circular obsolete dependencies issue will cause them to continually replace each other every update cycle (upstream bug bz448722 (upstream)). This issue will only occur on CentOS if both the 5.1 and 5.2 repositories are enabled at the same time, which will not happen by default. If you run into this issue because you have both repositories enabled, you can add exclude= openib-mstflint openib-perftest openib-tvflash in the 5.1 CentOS-Base.repo file for the [base] and [updates] sections.
There is a performance issue with 3ware controllers as called out in this bz444759 (upstream). There is a kernel in our Testing Repository (kernel-<version>.bz444759.<arch>.rpm) that addresses this issue. (Warning for this and other testing repo packages on this page: using testing repo packages possibly might break your system - so be careful applying those. They are our best effort to fix major upstream issues that look like they will either not be fixed or have a long lead time for fixing. They do not have the same QA as packages based on upstream releases. :D).
The nautilus-sendto package has a require for libgaim.so.0. This file no longer exists in the CentOS 5 tree, as gaim was replaced by pidgin. This is an upstream bug, please see bz250403 (upstream) and #2483 (CentOS) .
There is an issue with the kernel that causes it to fail booting on certain hardware. This is mostly the case on older hardware. The result is a kernel panic in the module powernowk8. This problem can occur on all type of systems including non-AMD ones. More info about this bug at #2912 (CentOS) and bz443853 (upstream).
The upstream bugzilla list of known and pending release issues is here.

5. Resolved Issues

CentOS had a kernel-<version>.bz321111 that addressed the NFS issue (CentOS bug|upstream bug). This issue is resolved in the 5.2, so this kernel is no longer necessary for NFS.
The typo in /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession which causes errors to appear in .xsession-errors has been fixed. (Issue #2258)
The system-config-httpd webserver configuration program no longer writes configuration files for httpd 2.0, but now does for the included httpd 2.2 webserver (bug #2078).

6. Packages and Applications

6.1. New packages in 5.2 that were not present in 5.1

See the Added Package section of the Package Manifest.

6.2. Packages that have been upgraded in 5.2 since the 5.1 release

See the Updated Packages section of the Package Manifest

6.3. Packages removed by upstream in 5.2 that were present in 5.1

See the Dropped Packages section of the Package Manifest.

6.4. Packages released as 5.1 updates with older packages on the 5.2 install media

gnutls, gnutls-devel, gnutls-utils
libxslt, libxslt-devel, libxslt-python
libvorbis, libvorbis-devel

These packages are now in the updates repository for CentOS 5.2.

6.5. Packages modified by CentOS

yum-priorities (plugin)
anaconda
anacron
basesystem
bluez-utils
brltty
busybox
centos-release
Cluster_Administration
clustermon
comps-extras
conga
Deployment_Guide
desktop-backgrounds
eclipse
filesystem
firefox
firstboot
gdm
geronimo-specs
Global_File_System
gnome-desktop
gnome-session
gzip
httpd
initscripts
kdebase
kdelibs
kudzu
nss
pango
pirut
pm-utils
procmail
python-virtinst
redhat-artwork
redhat-logos
redhat-lsb
redhat-rpm-config
rgmanager
rhdb-utils
rhgb
setuptool
specspo
squirrelmail
system-config-bind
tftp
thunderbird
Virtualization_Guide
xorg-x11-proto-devel
yum
yum-cron
yum-utils

Note: Details of changes can be found in the package changelog. Its also important to keep in mind that most of these packages are only changed to remove upstream branding, as required by their terms of use.

6.6. Packages removed from CentOS that are included upstream

redhat-release-5Client
redhat-release-5Server
redhat-release-notes-5Client
redhat-release-notes-5Server
rhel-instnum
rhn-check
rhn-client-tools
rhnlib
rhnsd
rhn-setup
rhn-setup-gnome

6.7. Packages added by CentOS that are not included upstream

centos-release
centos-release-notes
perl.i386 in the x86_64 distro (note: as of CentOS-5.2 the package has been moved from the distro to the extras repo)
yum-cron (missing in the x86_64 base repo; added to the extras repo)
yum-repolist which was available as a plugin in 5.0 and 5.1 has now been removed from 5.2 since the functionality has been incorporated into the newer yum. For people who have yum-repolist installed already, doing an update will cause yum to obsolete and therefore remove yum-repolist from your machine.

7. Community Involvement

As a CentOS user there are various ways you can help out with the CentOS community.

7.1. Special Interest Groups

CentOS consists of different Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that bring together people with similar interests. The following SIGs already exist:

Artwork - create and improve artwork for CentOS releases and promotion
Promotion - help promoting CentOS online or at events
Virtualization - unite people around virtualization in CentOS

And we encourage people to join any of these SIGs or start up a new SIG, eg.

Alpha, S390, Sparc and PPC port - help with porting CentOS to other architectures
Hardware compatibility - provide feedback about specific hardware
QA - help out with fixing bugs and testing new releases
RPM Packaging - contribute new useful RPM packages
Translation - help translating the documentation, website and wiki content

7.2. Mailinglists and Forums

Another way you can help out others in the community is by actively helping and resolving problems that users come up against in the mailinglists and forums.

7.3. Wiki and website

Even as an inexperienced CentOS user we can use your help. Because we like to know what problems you encountered, if you had problems finding specific information, how you would improve documentation so it becomes more accessible. This kind of feedback is as valuable to others as it would have been to you so your involvement is required to make CentOS better.

So if you want to help out and improve our documentation and wiki, register on the wiki or subscribe to the centos-docs mailinglist.

8. Further Reading

The following websites contain large amounts of information to help people with their CentOS systems :

9. Thanks

We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product.

Release Notes for the ISOs

Visit http://www.redhat.com/rhel/ (1)

This is a read-only archived version of wiki.centos.org