The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the availability of CentOS-4.3 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 64 (Athlon 64, Opteron) and Intel Pentium (Xeon EM64T) processors.

ia64 - This distribution supports Intel Itanium2 processors.

There may be a separate release announcement for individual architectures.

(Note: CentOS -4.3 for s390, s390x, alpha, ppc, sparc is in progress and will be announced later)

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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 ISOs (http, ftp, bittorrent) or DVD ISOs (bittorrent only) from this link:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/isos/

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MD5SUM values for CentOS ISOs

The md5sum values for the latest CentOS ISOs can be obtained from these links:

i386:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.3/isos/i386/md5sum.asc

x86_64:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.3/isos/x86_64/md5sum.asc

ia64:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.3/isos/ia64/md5sum.asc

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Major changes in this version of CentOS include:

1. Upgraded update system. The CentOS Project has designed a new update system to deal with the issues that we had during the last CentOS 4 update cycle. This new system provides more that 100 total mirrors for updates and picks geographically close and non-stale mirrors based on our master server's content. It provides failover capability, so if a mirror is unavailable another will be chosen. Combined with the optional yum-plugin-fastestmirror, it will also pick the mirror that has the fastest connection to your location.

The new update system uses yum only. Up2date will work for updates, but does not provide any of the new functionality, therefore yum is the recommended way for you to do CentOS updates.

To utilize the new update system with yum, you first need to update yum and centos-yumconf to the latest versions. These updates were released for CentOS 4 on February 16th (CEEA:2006:0216-001, centos-yumconf) and February 20th (CEBA:2006:0220-001, yum), so you may already have them.

You can check to see if you have the new yum and centos-yumconf with with command:

rpm -q yum centos-yumconf

If you have the below listed files, you are ready to use the new update system:

yum-2.4.2-2.centos4
centos-yumconf-4-4.5

If you have earlier versions of either program, you should be able to upgrade them with the command:

yum upgrade yum centos-yumconf

Note: If you have previously modified your /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file, a file named /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo.rpmnew will be created. If you want to use the new update system, this file should be copied to CentOS-Base.repo. An example of the new default /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file should look like is available here:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/CentOS-Base.repo

For more info on the update system, including how to install yum-plugin-fastestmirror, see:
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=118

2. Frysk, InfiniBand Architecture (IBA), and z/VM hypervisor issues are discussed in the upstream release notes. CentOS has support for these items as well. For more information see upstream release notes for your architecture for CentOS-4.3 on the CentOS documentation page:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/

3. Updated and added packages. There is a list of all packages either added or upgraded since CentOS-4.2 in the upstream release notes, please see the upstream release notes for your architecture for CentOS-4.3 on the CentOS documentation page:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/

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ISSUES:

1. There is a known upstream issue with recompiling anaconda with the new version of newt that is included in CentOS-4.3. If you need to build anaconda from the SRPM, you will need to downgrade your newt to newt-0.51.6-5. Please see this bug report: http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1251

2. There is a known upstream issue with the ypserver rpm that was provided for EL4 update 3 (ypserv-2.13-9). This is a major issue as it broke NIS authentication. The CentOS team rolled in a patch to the ypserver version on the install CD to fix this issue (ypserv-2.13-9.centos4). Subsequently, a new version of ypserver was release (ypserv-2.13-11) and is available in the updates for CentOS-4.3. Please see this bug report:
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1253

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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.centos.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