CentOS 6.2 Release Notes

Last updated: Jun 24, 2012

1. Translations

Translations of these release notes are available for the following languages :

2. Introduction

Welcome to the CentOS 6.2 release. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by our Upstream OS Provider (UOP)1.

CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.)

We have decided not to follow the UOP's usage of Installation Codes. All 'channels' are available to the System Administrator at time of installation.

Similar to the practice of the upstream vendor, there is no supported path to 'upgrade' an installation of a prior major CentOS release (presently CentOS 5 or CentOS 4) to a new major release. This is not a CentOS imposed limitation, but rather reflects the upstream's approach on this matter. People who feel adventuresome and want to experiment are reminded to take and test backups first. As a note to people who attempt the upgrade in spite of this warning, such as by the unsupported upgradeany option from the media install command line, please note that you will need to manually retrieve the current centos-release package, manually do a rpm -e --nodeps removal of the prior centos-release package, and then manually install the CentOS 6 centos-release package, before yum can have any chance of working properly.

The continuous release ( CR ) repository makes generally available packages that will appear in the next point release of CentOS, on a testing and hotfix basis until formally released.

Please read through the other sections before trying an install or reporting an issue.

3. Install Media and sha1sum

sha1sum i386: ad741581b3d3969bcf867cf1e47160902c8876f6 CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD1.iso 6131d4c8ca2be77a25eaf1c61f94c7500786e683 CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD2.iso 58cddfb2a6bd5094687a36f9fe94ce82967a4af0 CentOS-6.2-i386-LiveCD.iso 6c891e23c959787931fd2eb472211afd51709aa5 CentOS-6.2-i386-LiveDVD.iso 353d7e070a4cfc34148f9610b05cf1c55ad4fa57 CentOS-6.2-i386-minimal.iso 02444d6984089d9fc16ca989781482c8202357f0 CentOS-6.2-i386-netinstall.iso sha1sum x86_64: d97377c83fab7493dbd1c2e04dab29c8ba6cd351 CentOS-6.2-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso 7eac42c403725891b53cd899f0ef7560dc3a9d72 CentOS-6.2-x86_64-bin-DVD2.iso 0c329da3db427c3279d44f15a57ba85341d12197 CentOS-6.2-x86_64-LiveCD.iso 086f102c4c3ee228c5663cbaa2f1d6bf2edf5c4b CentOS-6.2-x86_64-LiveDVD.iso 10b26ce414af86be26f3a47dcc76d8f81e333979 CentOS-6.2-x86_64-minimal.iso 4858a8870cc5048876edd51dead25b9c718fcfbe CentOS-6.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso

4. Known Issues

On Intel and AMD based processor architectures, CentOS 6 requires PAE support for 32-bit x86 chips, following the upstream's requirement

The installer needs at least 392MB of memory to work. Text mode will automatically be used if the system has less than 652MB of memory.

The text installer has limited capabilities compared to the GUI installer. Most notably there is no support for configuring partition layout, storage methods or package selection . Please refer to the official documentation for details. Here you can find some useful information on creating and using kickstart files which can be used to perform advanced configuring without the need for the GUI installer.

The installer media for the 32 bits architecture ( CentOS-6.2-i386-netinstall.iso, CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD.iso ) does not offer at boot time the memory test suite (memtest ). The test is available in the x86_64 ( 64 bits - CentOS-6.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso,CentOS-6.2-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso ) images. This approach is identical to the one taken by the UOP.

The message "Insufficient memory to configure kdump!" appears during install. This is a known upstream bug which appears on systems with less than 4 GB RAM. This can be ignored.

Content for both the i386 and x86_64 arches is split into two DVDs. We have tried to get all basic server and basic desktop installs only from DVD-1.

Make sure that you setup correctly the selinux context of the public key if you transfer it to a CentOS 6 server with selinux enabled. Otherwise selinux might forbid access to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and by matter of consequence key authentication will not work. In order to setup the correct context you can use: restorecon -R -v /home/$ACCOUNT/.ssh ssh-copy-id from CentOS 6 is aware of selinux contexts and the previous workaround is not needed.

There is no longer a boot.iso image in the images/ directory of the installation tree. Use the netinstall.iso instead as documented in CentOS-6 FAQ #1.

Many people have complained that Ethernet interfaces are not started with the new default NetworkManager tool. See CentOS-6 FAQ#2.

A forum user has reported an issue with use of a local repo with a kickstart install, giving an error [Errno 14] Peer cert cannot be verified or peer cert invalid . The referenced post includes a workaround, and pointers to the upstream bug BZ#599040.

The packages tog-pegasus and libcmpiCppImpl0 can not be installed at the same time due to file conflicts. See upstream bugzilla entry #759302 for details.

There is no repo closure for the mingw32.noarch packages in the i386 arch in CentOS-6.2 due to a missing mingw32-gcc.i686 package. See CentOS Bug 0005316 for details.

Several packages have .centos. in their name and are not modified, see CentOS Bug #0005281 for details. Here are the SRPMS affected:

bash

emacs

gtk2

pango

at-spi

gtk2-engines

libcanberra

libgail-gnome

libwmf

Packagekit

system-config-date is missing a changelog entry (this is a carryover from the CentOS-6.0 build). See CentOS Bug #0005284 for details.

When you update the system to CentOS 6.2 and if selinux is disabled, you may see a message similar to "SELinux: Could not open policy file <= /etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy.24: No such file or directory". This is an upstream bug and will be fixed in a future version of selinux-policy-targeted. See upstream bugzilla entry #769859 for details.

5. Fixed Issues

CentOS bug #0005315: vdsm-4.9-63.el6.src.rpm removed from ftp.redhat.com

On Live CD/DVD, the Anaconda crash after timezone selection screen when the hostname is modified has been fixed. Unfortunately, the fix was to ignore these changes, so you will need to set your hostname after booting into the new install. See upstream bugzilla entry #698282 for details.

6. Packages and Applications

6.1. Packages modified by CentOS

abrt

anaconda

fake-provides

firefox

gnome-desktop

httpd

initscripts

kabi-whitelists

kabi-yum-plugins

kde-settings

kernel

luci

ntp

openssl098e

plymouth

redhat-bookmarks

redhat-logos

redhat-lsb

report

system-config-date

thunderbird

xulrunner

yum

6.2. Packages removed from CentOS that are included upstream

abrt-plugin-bugzilla

redhat-indexhtml

redhat-release-*

redhat-release-notes*

rhnlib

rhn-check

rhn-client-tools

rhnsd

rhn-setup

rhn-setup-gnome

yum-rhn-plugin

6.3. Packages added by CentOS that are not included upstream

centos-indexhtml

centos-release

centos-release-cr

7. Sources

All CentOS sources are now hosted at vault.centos.org:

8. How to help and get help

As a CentOS user there are various ways you can help out with the CentOS community. Take a look at our Contribute page for further information on how to get involved.

8.1. Special Interest Groups

CentOS consists of different Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that bring together people with similar interests. The following SIGs already exist:

Artwork - create and improve artwork for CentOS releases and promotion

Promotion - help promoting CentOS online or at events

Virtualization - unite people around virtualization in CentOS

And we encourage people to join any of these SIGs or start up a new SIG, e.g.

Alpha, S390, Sparc and PPC port - help with porting CentOS to other architectures

Hardware compatibility - provide feedback about specific hardware

RPM Packaging - contribute new useful RPM packages

Translation - help translating the documentation, website and Wiki content

8.2. Mailinglists and Fora

Another way you can help others in the community is by actively helping and resolving problems that users come up against in the mailing lists and the fora.

8.3. Wiki and Website

Even as an inexperienced CentOS user we can use your help. Because we like to know what problems you encountered, if you had problems finding specific information, how you would improve documentation so it becomes more accessible. This kind of feedback is as valuable to others as it would have been to you so your involvement is required to make CentOS better.

So if you want to help out and improve our documentation and Wiki, register on the Wiki or subscribe to the centos-docs mailing list.

9. Further Reading

The following websites contain large amounts of information to help people with their CentOS systems :

10. Thanks

We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product.

Copyright (C) 2011 The CentOS Project