CentOS-4.2 is Released for i386, x86_64, ia64, s390, s390x and alpha

The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the availability of CentOS-4.2 in the following architectures:

i386 - This distribution supports AMD (K6, K7, Thunderbird, Athlon, Athlon XP, Sempron), Pentium (Classic, Pro, II, III, 4, Celeron, M, Xeon), VIA (C3, Eden, Luke, C7) processors.

x86_64 - This distribution supports AMD (Athlon 64, Opteron) and Intel Pentium (Xeon EM64T) processors.

ia64 - This distribution supports Intel Itanium2 processors.

s390 - This distribution supports IBM S/390 processors.

s390x - This distribution supports IBM Z-Series servers.

alpha - This distribution supports the DEC Alpha processor.

There may be a separate release announcement for individual architectures.


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Current CentOS 4 users may upgrade by using up2date or yum and the normal upgrade process using the following commands:

yum upgrade

or

up2date -u

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The CentOS specific release notes for this upgrade are available here:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/RELEASE-NOTES-en.html

Documentation for CentOS 4 (including upstream release notes) is available here:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/

You may download the installation CD or DVD ISOs via bittorrent from this link:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/isos/

CD ISOs may also be downloaded via publicly available external mirrors:
http://www.centos.org/mirrors/

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Major changes in this version of CentOS include:

1. Upgraded yum. Yum has been upgraded to version 2.4.x, which adds a sqlite database backend for local metadata storage. This allows yum updates to be much faster than they were previously. The following packages are added or upgraded to facilitate the new yum: createrepo, centos-yumconf, sqlite, sqlite-devel, python-elementtree, python-sqlite, python-urlgrabber, yum.

2. SystemTap. CentOS-4.2 contains a technology preview release of SystemTap. SystemTap is a dynamic system profiling framework. SystemTap is only included as a preview, and should not be used in production at this time. Please see the SystemTap website for more information:
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

3. Updated and added packages. There is a list of all packages either added or upgraded since CentOS 4.1 in the upstream release notes, please see the upstream release notes for your architecture for CentOS-4.2 on the CentOS documentation page:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/

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ISSUES:

There is a known issue upstream when upgrading x86_64 servers. The issue seems to be related to the new audit and kernel packages when performing an upgrade. If you first install the new kernel and audit packages, then reboot and upgrade the rest of the packages, it seems to minimize this problem. Please see this bug report: http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1037

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To stay current with CentOS:

Visit our website at http://www.centos.org

Join the CentOS mailing list at:
http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Join various team members on IRC at irc.freenode.net #centos

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Note: It may take a couple days for some of the mirrors to catch up.

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Enjoy,

The CentOS Team