CentOS is a Linux distribution “derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor” (read Red Hat, Inc.). Version 6, released two days ago, is the latest stable release.

CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.

Free, community-driven versions of Linux don't often benefit from commercial enterprise support efforts.

CentOS, for those unfamiliar, is a clone distribution. The maintainers take the freely-available source code released by Redhat for its commercial Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product and recompile it, stripping out any trademarked artwork, then redistribute it as CentOS.

Administrators using CentOS, the free open source operating system built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, remain confident about the long-term stability of the OS, despite a recent shakeup prompted by the seeming disappearance of a CentOS administrator and co-founder.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

OpenLogic today announced it will partner with GroundWork to provide CentOS support for the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart Virtual Appliance based on CentOS

CentOS is based on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux source packages and shares in Red Hat Enterprise Linux's recent virtualization, app dev, security and storage improvements. Many of the enhancements in CentOS 5.3 come in the area of virtualization, targeted largely at scalability on large host machines.

CentOS is a "Community Enterprise OS", hence it's name. It's designed with the business user in mind, both on the desktop and in the server room. Since the last time we reviewed CentOS, it's under gone some changes, and seen a minor version upgrade to improve a number of features.