CentOS

CentOS is the repackaging of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is almost entirely the same, outside of the logo, though there have been a few minor additions which have been pending on the RHEL path. When you add the fact that with few exceptions, it tracks RHEL very closely temporally, with patches being often being released within days of their RHEL release, it is well worth considering in cases where you want the stability of RHEL without the cost of support.

Advantages of CentOS include:

• The stability of RHEL. The indirect backing of the RHEL development effort. Releases are supported for longer than the 13 month (two releases plus a month) of FC.

Disadvantages of CentOS include:

• Packages are often significantly dated. For example, as of this writing, RHEL/CentOS 5.5 are still on PHP 5.1, while the current stable release is 5.3.x

Interestingly, the disadvantage of significant dating on the software releases has one interesting side effect. While Xen hosting has not been supported in FC since FC8 (support was removed as of FC9, "pending upline support of the ParaVirtOps?" (see here for details), as of RHEL5.5, there is still support for a Xen Dom0. Unfortunately, Red Hat has announced that RHEL 6 will not support Xen, and has moved to KVM.

Setting up httpd with postgresql/mysql