CentOS 5.3 Release Notes

1. Translations

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

[:/BrazilianPortuguese:Brazilian Portuguese] (português do Brasil) - Cleber Paiva de Souza
[:/Czech:Czech] (Česky) - David Hrbáč
[:/German: German] (Deutsch) - [:MarcusMoeller: Marcus Moeller]
[:/Japanese: Japanese] (日本語) - [:AkemiYagi: Akemi Yagi], [:HajimeTaira: Hajime Taira]
[:/Korean: Korean] (한국어) - YoungHoon Park
[:/Romanian : Romanian] - Manuel Wolfshant
[:/Russian:Russian] (Русский) - [:NikolayUlyanitsky: Nikolay Ulyanitsky]
[:/Spanish: Spanish] (Español) -

2. Introduction

Welcome to the CentOS 5.3 release. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by our Upstream OS Provider (UOP)FootNote(Visit http://www.redhat.com/rhel/).

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 5.3 is the third 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

4. Known Issues

When updating from 5.2 to 5.3 you can run into a problem with rpm: "rpmdb: unable to lock mutex: Invalid argument". To avoid this please update glibc before updating the rest of the installation: yum update glibc && yum update
There is a bug when updating openmpi and lam packages. These have to be uninstalled before you update. See the upstream Release Notes for details.
When performing remote updates over ssh, consider using a screen session or updating in small chunks to minimize the impact of a lost connection mid update.
There is a major anaconda issue when using kickstart. With 5.3 you cannot set the time zone in the kickstart file. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481617 for the bug report. There is a workaround at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-15687
The NTFS code is broken. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481495 for details. Because of this defect, the centosplus kernel in 5.3 does not have NTFS turned on, unlike all previous versions. Users who need NTFS should use the ntfs-3g driver. See http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/NTFS
There is a dependency bug in NetworkManager/wpa_supplicant. If you update NetworkManager you also have to update wpa_supplicant, this does not always happen automatically. See http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3399
The 5.3 install crashes after a successful situtation under Parallels 3. The installation itself crashes on Parallels 3, when you try to install with encrypted hard drives.
When using diskboot.img to install from a USB drive, anaconda tries to install GRUB on the USB drive rather than on the local HDD. Removing the USB drive after getting into the GUI (before the partitioning section) works around this problem.

5. Resolved Issues

Support for the Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller is now back. It was broken since 5.1 kernel but it's supported (as it was previously) with the sky2 module.
The nautilus-sendto bug has been fixed. nautilus-sendto cannot send files via Pidgin this way, but the "Gnome Desktop" group is now installable via yum groupinstall. See http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2483 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=250403

6. Changes

6.1. New packages in 5.3 that were not present in 5.2

6.2. Packages that have been upgraded in 5.3 since the 5.2 release

6.3. Packages removed by upstream in 5.3 that were present in 5.2

6.4. Packages released as 5.2 updates with older packages on the 5.3 install media

7. Changes done by CentOS

7.1. Packages modified by CentOS

7.2. Packages removed from CentOS that are included upstream

redhat-release-5Client-5.3.0.3.i386.rpm
redhat-release-5Server-5.3.0.3.i386.rpm
redhat-release-notes-5Client-25.i386.rpm
redhat-release-notes-5Server-25.i386.rpm
rhel-instnum-1.0.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm
rhn-check-0.4.19-17.el5.noarch.rpm
rhn-client-tools-0.4.19-17.el5.noarch.rpm
rhnlib-2.2.6-2.el5.noarch.rpm
rhnsd-4.6.1-1.el5.i386.rpm
rhn-setup-0.4.19-17.el5.noarch.rpm
rhn-setup-gnome-0.4.19-17.el5.noarch.rpm
yum-rhn-plugin-0.5.3-30.el5.noarch.rpm

7.3. Packages added by CentOS that are not included upstream

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)

8. How to help and get help

As a CentOS user there are various ways you can help out with the CentOS community. Take a look at our [:Contribute:Contribute] page for further information on how to get involved.

8.1. Special Interest Groups

CentOS consists of different [http://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup Special Interest Groups] (SIGs) that bring together people with similar interests. The following SIGs already exist:

[:SpecialInterestGroup/Artwork:Artwork] - create and improve artwork for CentOS releases and promotion
[:SpecialInterestGroup/Promo:Promotion] - help promoting CentOS online or at events
[:SpecialInterestGroup/Virtualization: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

8.2. 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 [http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo the mailinglists] and [http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/ forums].

8.3. 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 [http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-docs centos-docs] mailinglist.

9. Further Reading

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

10. Thanks

We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product.

[:Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.3/Stub:Release Notes for the ISOs]