Just finished installing the first distro tree for what will become CentOS 5 x86_64. And I have to say this - it rocks! There are a lot of new features that are going to be loved by everyone out there. But first, a few words about what is going on.
Rather than just bang out the distro, which we could have done a few weeks back, we decided to work on the back end infrastructure for the distro first. Putting in place a distributed build system, package tracking, composer scripts, various means of build testing, build verification etc. And while we were doing this, we were using live centos-5-beta sources to prove the system works ( side note: so far, the tree has been rebuilt about 12 times, 3 times each on i386/x86_64 and 6 times on ppc/ppc64 ). So while the release has gotten delayed due to this extra work, I hope this pays off in the long term, with faster updates and a better tested release process.
Back to the issue of when is release going to happen ? The short answer is : when its ready. The long answer is : very soon now, but we want to release to a select few testers first. Once they give it the thumbs up, we'll make a public release available to everyone. If you want to get onto this list of testers, get in touch with one of the CentOS developers.
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Karanbir Singh {http://www.karan.org/}
Would love to be one of the testers for Centos 5.0
Yeah, me too i would like to test it on sun v20z and v40z x86_64 and some laptop.
Sign me up for the beta. I just built a new server and can test it out on it. 
You guys rock! Thank you for all the hard work.
Matt,
gimme gimme CentOS 5 :-D
Thanks for the info. I'm very interested in CentOS 5. I have some issues which seem to be resolved in kernel 2.6.18. I'm interested in testing as soon as you have something available.
Would like to try it too. Just build my new machine; its hungry for the 5th version.
Sign me up as volunteer to test CentOS 5 release! :)
We are running several varieties of Globus Toolkit on multiple Xen guests using a couple of CentOS 4.4 Xen hosts. And we're really anxious to start using Gfarm with FUSE on some of these guests.
I also would love to be one of the testers for Centos 5.0
Please include me in the test too.
I would like to be a beta tester. I built a box with BioStar TForce 550 motherboard and AMD A64 X2 4200+ CPU especially for Centos 5. I intend to use it as a PVR, home security, and general multimedia box (MythTV, Zone Minder). I would like to run my PCI security camera capture cards in a different Centos VM from my PCI TV tuner cards.
Bit late i know, but i'd like to do some testing! I have a range of bleeding edge new and stone age old server hardware.
So there isn't any public download for CentOS5-beta, huh?!
Intersting - my limited playing around with Fedora 6 at home has been with somewhat limited successs - it gets stuck at "formating HDD..." - I wonder if Centos 5 would be any better. If you need a newbie guinea pig you know where to find me. :) 
Hello, I would also like to test Centos5 on my Dell WS450 and 2 noname servers, one duron 1200, and one dual p3 1000mhz... :) Centos3 and 4 was nice, and Im looking forward to test Centos 5. 
I'm really looking for a way to avoid installing FC6 to get the newer Xen kernels. Really looking forward to a beta as I just took my Xen box out of production due to incompatibility between my MCP51 sata_nv drivers and the Xen 3 2.6.16 kernels. I really want a newer kernel with better driver support. 
I'm dying for CentOS 5 as well. Are there any updates you can give us on its status? 
Would love to be one of the testers for Centos 5.0 
What's happened, it sounded like a public beta was just about to be released at the start of jan and 6 weeks later still no update 
Am looking forward to release of CentOS5 so I can run CentOS guests on my FC6 xen host.
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