CentOS 5.6 is out
Probably while I write this you are already aware of it or already downloading but finally the CentOS team released the latest update to the 5.x branch, CentOS 5.6 is out.
Among the other and exciting news about this release I think it is worth mentioning :
- Full “official” support to the EXT4 filesystem
- Updated libvirt
- php53 ships by default
- bind 97 (yay!)
- … and much much more 
You can release the official release notes here while if you are eager to test drive the new release here’s the download link for both the 32 and 64 bit releases.
Upgrade CentOS 5.5 to 5.6
If you like me have already installed base of CentOS machines you easily upgrade the release with the following command :
yum update
Yum will take care of everything while you can sit back and relax while your operating system is upgraded, once the installation process is completed you can check the release of your OS with :
cat /etc/redhat-release
which should show
CentOS release 5.6 (Final)
In a nutshell
So far I’ve already updated all my lab CentOS machines, around 20 virtual machines running various non critical services, without any problem and tomorrow I will start with pre-production systems at work.
The only thing to pay attention to is the up-time of the system, last time I’ve upgraded my production systems it took a while as I had reached the FSCK time and one complete pass of disk check was forced on a few of my systems which took some time.
CentOS 6
With CentOS 5.6 out of the way the Dev team can now fully dedicate to the 6 branch release, so we can just hope it will get released as soon as possible so that we can start playing with the new exciting features present with the new major release of Red Hat /CentOs.
Happy upgrade!