[Centos] CentOS 3.4 - i386 release

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.torrent
3 binary iso's
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.4/isos/i386/CentOS-3.4-i386-discs1-3.torrent
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.rpm

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-3.1-0.20050105.3.noarch.rpm

(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.i386.rpm

(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.

------------

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
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