[CentOS-announce] CentOS-4/alpha 4.1beta is there to play

[Pasi Pirhonen]

Hi,

I've always been kind of on/off with alpha. Remember making some kind
of debian/alpha installer back -97ish. Lately (like past 2 years), i've
been compiling SRPMS on alpha too from time to time.

Most of my alpha hardware was pretty much ancient crap, so i wasn't
quite confident pushing anything out to public as i wasn't able to test
even if EV6 would be ok. Little over week ago i got a AlphaServer ES45,
which was the turning point on this all (i thank you whom gave me this
box once again even tho i cannot reveal any names).

There is lot to personally thank for AlphaCore project as some of the
patches i got directly from that work, would have been nasty for me to
spot out. I just don't feel that building FC3 for alpha is enought and
will be long term maintainable.

That's where CentOS-4/alpha should kick in as the basic codebase should
be maintained next 7ish years. There are modified SRPMS beoynd the
normal CentOS mods, but it's some 30ish of those now, so it's only
really few of them all.


AVAILABILITY:


http://beta.centos.org/centos/4.1beta/isos/alpha/

- which does have ISO-images and .torrent files for CD/DVD-images.
- DVD-image does contain full binaries + source
- ISOS labeled 'bin' are binaries only
- ISOS labeles 'src' are the sources


http://beta.centos.org/centos/4.1beta/os/

- which is unpacked, installable tree.


http://beta.centos.org/centos/4.1beta/

- generally as this is the point when the yum config should point for
updates etc.


BETA RELEASE INFO:

It ain't perfect. There are lot to improve still. I just wanted to make
this public beta now so there might be some community interest/help
for making it really smooth.

One thing woth of mentining is that CFLAGS have been '-mtune=ev6' for all
the packages, that does obey normal rpmbuild process. I am not sure
what the impact is in real life, but IMO it won't make a really slow
hardware any _slower_ and might even a little faster for anything
useable (no pun intended. 'useable' may vary from person to person :)


EXPECTED FINAL RELEASE TIME:

I'd expect this to be bit much polished up time of CentOS 4.2 will be
reality. At least it's where i am aming for final release.


TESTED PLATFORMS:

- a quad-1GHz ES45 w/ Radeon 9250 (PCI)
- a AlphaStation 255/233 (text mode install)
- a AlphaStation 1000 (text mode install)
- ES45 was trested with console=ttyS0 too from the DVD

KNOWN ISSUES:

- The kernel isn't stock same one it's in other CentOS-4 releases
- The php was replaced with new one

- compat-glibc isn't there yet. Neither the later one or the Compaq
release Redhat 7.2 one. I've patched the compat-glibc-2.3.2-95.30axp.src.rpm
to build, but it was too late to include it to ISOs as i haven't had
much time to test it and there is not real needs for this.

- anaconda is putting the 'rhgb quiet' on command line even after text
installtion, which might just crash the boot as graphics we're asked
for first place.

- the DVD isn't working at least on my ES45 with IDE-drive. SCSI is
fine. I have to look about mkisofs ordering, because that might just be
so that those needed files are 'unreachable' for SRM w/ IDE.

- the aboot menu lacks the predefined selection for 'text askmethod' for
forced text mode instalaltion from net for example. Forgot that one.

- SELinux rulesets aren't quite right for everything, so
disabling/making it warn level lets it boot better now on installation.

- I've built some of the packages by disabling the checks at
buildtime, so there might be 'non-working' software. namely gmp,
subversion from memory.


INVOLVING:

- join the mailing lists at 

http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel

- mail me directly to upi at iki.fi

- more information from http://www.centos.org/


That's about it. I am sure i've already forgotten much i ment to say on
this beta release announcement, but now i do push send and worry things
later more.



-- 
Pasi Pirhonen - upi at iki.fi - http://iki.fi/upi/
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