I would like to take the time to inform people that CentOS-4.4 will contain some major changes. The changes are significant enough that I would like to spell out some of them now, probably at least a month before the release of the upstream "EL4 update 4" is released.
The Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, Chat clients) will be replaced by SeaMonkey. This is due to Mozilla's change in policy and support for older versions.
The Firefox 1.0.x (currently 1.0.8) web browser will be replaced by Firefox 1.5.x (currently 1.5.0.3). We currently have a version of Firefox 1.5.x in the CentOSPlus repo. That version will be replaced by the EL4 version after some more testing ... and the new version will be rolled into CentOS-4.4 in the Base repository when CentOS-4.4 is released.
The Thunderbird 1.0.x (currently 1.0.8) will be upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5.x (currently 1.5.0.2).
The OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 will be replaced by OpenOffice 1.1.5. This allows better sharing of files between OpenOffice.org 2.0 and CentOS clients.
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All these changes will be implemented upstream and rolled out in the released source code, so they will be incorporated into CentOS as well. We will fully test these packages prior to release of the CentOS-4.4 ISOs, however these changes are fairly substantial.
I would also like to remind people who are more cautious that CentOS has a vault that will contain CentOS-4.3 after we shift the main mirrors to CentOS-4.4. The vault is available at:
I am not suggesting that people don't upgrade (as security updates would require one to maintain the current version), but I am just providing information so that if the updates break something, you can easily get back to a known previous version.
We have not had any problems so far with the new packages in our testing, and they will be deemed STABLE by upstream when they are released, however these changes are by far the most significant since the release of CentOS-4 and I think they deserve some special attention.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes CentOS-4 Lead Developer