CentOS starts issuing ‘rolling releases’

Developers behind the CentOS project have started releasing so-called ‘rolling releases’ of the Linux distribution. This means that a recent issue with the latest updates is published at least monthly.

The release contains all security updates, bug fixes, improvements, and general updates for the operating system to date. This means that users who want to install the operating system do not need to install numerous packages before CentOS is up to date.

For now, the developers only support the latest major release of the operating system, version 7.0. The ISO files with the live versions would follow in the foreseeable future, after which version 6.0 will also be subject to the rolling releases. For the version before that, it does not come to that: the installer does not meet the requirements.

The developers behind the CentOS project released version 7.0 of the Linux distribution in July. This was preceded by a development process of almost three years. The release includes some ‘fundamental tweaks’, such as the implementation of the systemd daemon, the Gnome 3 desktop environment, and the xfs filesystem.

CentOS is a free Linux distribution that is popular on servers and uses the source code of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro. The company behind the latter took over the CentOS project early this year. Since then, Red Hat has released three distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and CentOS.