CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.)
CentOS is developed by a small but growing team of core developers. In turn the core developers are supported by an active user community including system administrators, network administrators, enterprise users, managers, core Linux contributors and Linux enthusiasts from around the world.

CentOS has numerous advantages over some of the other clone projects including: an active and growing user community, quickly rebuilt, tested, and QA'ed errata packages, an extensive mirror network, developers who are contactable and responsive, multiple free support avenues including IRC Chat, Mailing Lists, Forums, a dynamic FAQ. Commercial support is offered via a number of vendors.

CentOS 5 Releases

The CentOS team is pleased to announce the availability of CentOS 5.5. Major changes in CentOS 5.5 compared to CentOS 5.4 include:

OpenOffice.org Update to version 3.1.1
Samba3x in version 3.3.8
PostgreSQL84 in version 8.4
Freeradius2

The latter three aren't installed by default, but they can be used to upgrade from the still included older versions of these packages.

Other upgrades include newer version of the wireless drivers suite, including newer versions of the ath9k driver and the iwlwifi drivers. The GNU Debugger gdb, Valgrind and SystemTap also have been updated.