In m23 12.2 rock, CentOS 6.2 now complements the list of distributions which can be installed and administered with m23. The support for CentOS - like for Fedora14 and openSUSE 11.4 before - was implemented by using the halfSister extension. In addition to this, new features have been added to the halfSister API, the French help texts have been revised and the usual 'bits and pieces' have been added.

---What is m23?---

m23 is a free software distribution system licensed under the GPL, that installs and administrates clients with Debian, (X/K)Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE, Fedora, and LinuxMint.

m23 can install and manage Linux client computers via network. It uses a web interface. Clients that already exist, can be integrated into m23. Group functions and mass installation tools make managing a vast number of clients comfortable. Client backup and server backup are included to avoid data loss. With the integrated virtualisation software, m23 can create and manage virtual m23 clients, that run on real m23 clients or the m23 server. Scripts and software packages (for installation on the clients) can be created directly from the m23 web interface.

---What is new in the latest version?---

CentOS 6.2 is the first halfSister distribution which m23 can install on 32- as well as on 64-bit systems. The community distribution CentOS, is fully binary compatible to the commercial variant, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is focused on stability and long-term support and (along with Debian) it constitutes a possibility when you need a system that can be employed in the long run.

For the new version, the French m23 help texts have been revised and some improvements have been incorporated into the other language versions.

The halfSister API was complemented by calls for changing user names and passwords. The hardware setup was adapted in such a way that it is now possible to install data partitions on a software RAID and to even allow an installation of some distributions on these. To simplify the development of the m23HSAdmin scripts for the different distributions, there is now the new tool checkForMissingHSFunctions.sh, to check if all implementations have the same functional range.

Beside the important changes, there are, of course, also some less obvious improvements. For example, the mount points of partitions are now shown when the mouse pointer is hovering over the info icon. After the creation of a disk or partition image, the client will be shut down or re-booted, depending on its state before the creation of the image. During the search for packages, an animation is now shown and after completion of the search, the long package descriptions and the package sizes in MB are now listed for all distribtutions. Further changes concern the administration of the m23 administrators. Passwords can now contain any kind of character and after logout from m23, the index page of the m23 server is now shown automatically.

Only very rarely, a function is removed from m23, and until now, this fate only occured to outdated distributions which were no longer maintained. This version is an exception of that practice, as it deactivates the plugin interface, which seems to have almost never been used, and removes it from the menu.

---How to get m23---

The latest version is available via the m23 update interface, via APT (instructions for adding the repository can be found on the website), as ISO file to burn the m23 server installation CD or as pre-installed virtual machine.
The new version will also be demonstrated at the m23 booth on the Berlin LinuxTag in May.

Linux deployment tool m23 12.2 now supports CentOS