For Release: January 10, 2005
The CentOS Team is pleased to announce the official release of CentOS 3.4 for i386.
This release includes all RHEL 3 updates (for U4) and errata up to January 5th, 2005. New ISO images are available as well as an installable DVD edition with source. In addition this release is available via BitTorrent.
Downloading -- Bittorrent -------------------------
Bittorrents of a DVD image , binary iso's, and source iso's are available as follow:
dvd iso http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/isos/i386/CentOS-3.4-i386-dvd.iso.torren... 3 binary iso's http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/isos/i386/CentOS-3.4-i386-discs1-3.torre... 3 source iso's http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/isos/i386/CentOS-3.4-i386-src1-3.torrent
Please use bittorrent and keep your downloader running for others to use even after the download completes.
If you need to install bittorrent for CentOS, rpms are available from Dag's repository.
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/bittorrent/bittorrent-3.4.2-1.1.el3.rf.noarch...
An earlier version of bittorrent is also available in the CentOS 3.3 <contrib> repo - which may be installed using 'yum install bittorrent' - a gui version is also available - 'yum install bittorrent-gui'
Then execute btdownloadcurses.py <url to .torrent file> in a shell. (or btdownloadgui.py for the gui) You may need to open ports 6881-6889 and 6969 if you have tight firewall restrictions.
The .torrent files are also available on all caosity mirrors.
Once again - please leave your downloader running after the download is complete (with ports 6881-6889 open) as your downloader will become part of the peer to peer bittorrent network and reduce the load on our mirror servers.
Further information on bittorrent is available at http://bittorrent.com
Downloading -- .iso images -------------------------
iso images are available from your favorite CentOS mirror as well. A current list of mirrors can be obtained from http://www.centos.org/mirrors
Purchasing ----------
isos are available to purchse from www.cheeplinux.com (UK) and should also be available from a number of other online vendors.
Upgrade Notes -------------
Initially CentOS 3.3 systems will not be automatically upgraded to CentOS 3.4. However in 72-96 hours from this announcment the centos-release rpm for 3.4 will be added to the 3.3 tree and that will force automatic upgrades when using yum.
If you do NOT want to upgrade then exclude centos-release from updates in your yum.conf. We will try to maintain security updates for CentOS 3.3 for as long as there are no issues that mean they cant be used (eg 3.4 specific dependency issue) -- but as soon as that happens we will have to close the CentOS 3.3 tree.
From this point forward $releasever will stay at 3. When 3.5 is released systems will automatically get updated. To prevent this you will need to hard code 3.4 in yum.conf in place of $releasever.
To manually upgrade to CentOS-3.4 (now) ---------------------------------------
first
rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/centos-yumcache-3.1-...
(to avoid the header downloads)
(Note: If you had poreviously upgraded from CentOS 3.1 then you will already have a cento s-yumcache rpm installed and rpm will complain , in which case use rpm -Fvh)
rpm -Fvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/centos-release-3-4.2...
(to get the new releasever)
then
yum update
To automatically upgrade to CentOS 3.4 (from 72-96 hours time) ------------------------------------------------------
We recommend that you install centos-yumcache before updating as it will save all the header downloading.
yum install centos-yumcache yum update centos-release yum update
Otherwise yum will take two update cycles to perform the update, the first will update centos-release and the second will download all the headers and then update all the packages.
CENTOSPLUS ----------
The new CentOSplus repo is designed to allow us to provide extended functionality to CentOS without compromising compatibility with Redhat Enterprise Linux. Packages that will live in CentOSplus - such as MySQL-4 - would update packages in the base distro, so it is only recommended that you enable CentOSplus in yum.conf when you are sure that is what you want. The difference between CentOSplus and 'extras' is that 'extras' are additional packages that are not already installed, so would not update existing packages beyond Rhel-3 , but provide extra functionality. It is hoped that there will be a wide range of CentOSplus packages provided in the future.
RELEASE NOTES & CAVEATS -----------------------
-- YUM --
Your yum.conf should not get overwritten by the upgrade, but the new version may get written as yum.conf.rpmnew
If your /etc/yum.conf file is a symlink to centos-yum.conf and you have manually edited centos-yum.conf, your centos-yum.conf file will be replaced by a new centos-yum.conf from the centos-yumconf rpm file in CentOS 3.4. Your existing centos-yum.conf file will be saved as yum.conf-SAVE.
The following changes have been made tp the default centos-yum.conf :-
Reference to the CentOSplus repository has been added (see below) but is not activated.
The download path has changed from /centos-3/$releasever to /centos/$releasever to allow for update to CentOS-4 and later versions without having to change the configuration file.
If you have edited yum.conf then neither of these changes will prevent it working but you would be advised to make them to avoid future problems.
-- CENTOS-RELEASE RPM --
In order to accomodate compatibility with Dag's and other 3rd party repositories, the naming convention of centos-release has been changed. The version is now 3 (rather than 3.3) and will remain fixed $releasever used by yum) for the life of CentOS 3. The first number of the release will now carry the designation of the edition.
For example, CentOS 3.4 ships with centos-release-3-4.2. The version is 3 and the release is 4.2. Compare this with the centos-release from the prior version: centos-release-3.3-1. yum detected $releasever as 3.3.
Dag's excellent repository of Enterprise Linux RPMS. can be found at http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
-- RPM --
Due to an upstream bug that causes RPM to fail and requires manual elimination of the RPM database, CentOS 3.4 ships with the RPM used in CentOS 3.3. When the upstream providor releases a patched RPM the CentOS team will follow suit. CentOS 3.4 ships with rpm-4.2.3-10 as did CentOS 3.3 rather than rpm-4.3.3-13 provided with rhel3 U4.
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143532)
-- MAILMAN --
CentOS 3.4 now ships with mailman as released by RedHat with quarterly Update 4 (U4). However the CentOS 3.4 verion is NOT compatible with the version available via CentOS 3.3 Extras. Since you can't read the Mailman upgrade documentation, we have made the upgrade notes available on the CentOS website. Read them here http://www.centos.org/mailman
Databases will need to be manually updated per the instructions above. If want to avoid upgrading Mailman at this time, then temporarily exclude mailman from updates in your yum.conf until you are happy with the upgrade.
No further updates to the 3.3 version of mailman will be released by the CentOS team.
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To stay up to date with CentOS join the CentOS mailing list at http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Join #centos at irc.freenode.net
Or participate in the web forums at www.centos.org
Please add any errors or bugs you encounter to buzilla on http://www.centos.org/bugs.
Enjoy,
The CentOS Team
Lance Davis CentOS 3 i386 Release Manager