CentOS

CentOS (abbreviated from Community Enterprise Operating System) is a Linux distribution that attempts to provide a free, enterprise-class, community-supported computing platform which aims to be functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In January 2014, CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL, under a new CentOS governing board.

The first CentOS release in May 2004, numbered as CentOS version 2, was forked from RHEL version 2.1AS. Since the release of version 7.0, CentOS officially supports only the x86-64 architecture, while versions older than 7.0-1406 also support IA-32 with Physical Address Extension (PAE), with additional architectures supported in CentOS versions older than 4.7. As of December 2015, AltArch releases of CentOS 7 are available for the IA-32 architecture, Power architecture, and for the ARMv7hl and AArch64 variants of the ARM architecture.

History

Prior to becoming known under its current name, CentOS originated as a build artifact of cAos Linux. At the time, some of the cAos contributors were merely interested in this build artifact for their own use, citing difficulties in collaborating with other noteworthy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clones of the time.