On April 12, the CentOS team announced the final release of CentOS 5. This follows roughly 1 month after RedHat released RHEL 5. So far CentOS 5 is available for i386 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) PC hardware platforms although they expect to have future releases available to support PowerPC, IA64 and Sparc.

There are many updated software packages in CentOS 5, including Apache at 2.2 and MySQL at 5.0. I think the most significant part of CentOS 5 is the bundled Xen virtualization technology. We are doing some in-house testing with Xen now.