Quoting Patrick Useldinger pu.news.001@gmail.com:

Hello,

I am a Slackware user who's interested in learning CentOS. At this point it is for intellectual curiosity only and not for any real work so the machine need not be 100% stable at this point. It's most probably going to be an installation into VMWare.

Given that, I thought I'd wait for 5-beta (mid-Jan'07) and start with that.

Will it be possible to upgrade from 5-beta to 5.0? Or would you advise me to start with 4.4?

Beta is for people who already use version 4 and want to have a peak into the next version, and/or check out if it works OK with their existing environments (hardware, applications, etc). It might not be possible to upgrade from beta to final (Red Hat doesn't support that, CentOS might support it but no guaranties).

There's bunch of changes between versions 4 and 5. If it's just for playing around, try out 5 beta (you can already get it from Red Hat, CentOS 5 beta will be preatty much the same stuff). There's more features and more eye candie. Especially for laptop users. By the time you are finished with playing with it, the final version might already be just around the corner. However, don't judge finished and stable product (version 4) by bugs in unfinished and unstable product (version 5 beta).

Thinking of it, if you are installing it on VmWare anyhow, install both. Version 4 to check out stability (but you might be dissapointed with older versions of packages). Version 5 beta to check out new features.