>From http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090629 "....Right next to the Gentoo stand was a group of young people, proudly displaying their affiliation with CentOS. Dag Wieers, the well-known maintainer of a once very popular RPM repository, greeted me with a big smile: "Do you know CentOS?" When I introduced myself, he looked somewhat disappointed: "Oh, so you know CentOS..." Still, we found a lot to talk about. "Yes, CentOS is often considered a server operating system," explained Dag, "but we are trying to change that. In fact, the latest release has many up-to-date desktop packages and we also have an extra repository with many application and drivers that are not officially part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)." He asserted: "CentOS can be a perfect system for those who need long-term stability and who don't want to take frequent and potentially risky upgrade paths." ...." A quick look at http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=centos shows that a great majority of the packages are not even close to being "up-to-date", and that is a good thing for those us of who care more about stability than eyecandy. >From the comment "...latest release has many up-to-date desktop packages and we also have an extra repository with many application and drivers that are not officially part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)..." is is safe to assume that future releases of Centos will remain a "built from publicly available open source SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policies and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork).", AND all additional non-PNAELV packages will remain in the extra repository??? thanks bn