An Introduction to CentOS

CentOS (Community-ENTerprise OS) is an unrestricted distribution of Linux that derives entirely from the freely available sources of Redhat Enterprise Linux (the difference being that updates are done using yum instead of up2date, and are completely free of charge instead of subscription-based). It is one of the best ways to deploy Linux in a corporate, enterprise or server environment. CentOS is developed by a small community of developers who are supported by a huge number of system administrators from around the world.

You may be asking yourself why you would want to set up a relatively unheard of Linux distribution, instead of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and others. CentOS provides several benefits in an enterprise environment which give it a leg up over these competitors. CentOS is on a very slow release schedule, with packages in the latest distribution sometimes several years behind software included in alternative Linux installs. Feature updates are rarely pushed out through yum, yet security holes are patched almost instantly. "Outdated" packages give you a known-good set of software to work with, covering every basic need a company might have. Office software, web browsers, email packages and many others are all provided gratis. With the long release and support cycles system administrators need not waste time dealing with the sort of package dependency problems encountered by Linux distributions that use up-to-the-minute software packages.