I know I might bag out CentOS at the best of times, but Karanbir Singh – our fearless leader of all CentOS developers has announced the immediate availability of CentOS-5.7 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.
Well, what are you waiting for? yum upgrade.
Imagine if there was an application that you could feed a disk image to, wether it be Microsoft Windows 2008 or Red Hat EL 6 and see a list of applications that are installed – no step back – imagine if there was an application that you could feed a disk image to and just discover what operating system was installed.
Well fear not! There is such an application. I kid you not, if you are anything like me you are going to look and see this as one of the most amazing discoveries. When I found this, I had a “oh my goodness, why didn’t I know about this sooner” moment.
libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. You can use this for viewing and editing files inside guests, scripting changes to VMs, monitoring disk used/free statistics, P2V, V2V, performing partial backups, cloning VMs and much much more.
libguestfs basically allows you to do anything that you have ever dreamed of. Yes. It will even read your Windows Registry “hive” files and spit them out as XML files.
The virt-inspector command examines a virtual machine or disk image and tries to determine the version of the operating system and other information about the virtual machine.
libguestfs is definitely on the TODO list for installing 
I am love. I could just imagine a nice web application thrown on top of this that would allow you to do funky things like that a WIndows machine offline, run a Windows Update *while the virtual machine is not running* and then start the machine up again. Doesn’t sound awesome yet? Think about it this way: a new Windows update is released. You take an LVM snapshot of the currently running box. You apply any Windows Update to the new LVM snapshot, shutdown the current running box while bringing up the new one (or edit the registry and remove any details of the IP and add a script to run on startup…)… so many ideas
Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, release 5.6 (with kernel-2.6.18-238.el5)!
In virtualisation land, one of the major changes have been the addition of the virtio balloon driver. This new driver in Red Hat 5.6 allows guests to express to the hypervisor how much memory they require. The balloon driver allows the host to efficiently allocate memory to the guest and allow free memory to be allocated to other guests and processes.
Also, In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, a global synchronization point is added to pvclock, providing a more stable time source for guests, which is good because this has been the cause of so many time slips in guest clocks.
RHEL 5.6 also pushes the BIND server to the latest release number.
And guess what. Oh my goodness: PHP 5.3! I know, it seems strange, but finally Red Hat ships with PHP 5.3 as default!
There are many other noteworthy changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, and I would highly suggest that you read the release notes for Red Hat 5.6.
Karanbir (the lead developer of CentOS) has asked on Twitter what should be released and how: CentOS 5.6 or CentOS 6? Arrfab has stated the reasons why CentOS 5.6 should be released first:
and although I am excited to see CentOS 6.0 be released, I must say that I agree that CentOS 5.6 should be released first.
Want to know what the status is of CentOS 6 is and how far away it is to being completed? There is a page on the CentOS wiki which contains a list of all the packages which the developers are currently focusing their attention on. Head over to http://wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/6/AuditStatus for more information on the status of this Audit process.
Seems like CentOS 6 is still at least six weeks away, if not more. There is always quite a bit of work involved when a new version of RHEL is released – especially a major version such as RHEL 6.
I Can’t wait to install CentOS 6!