How to upgrade CentOS 5.3 to 5.4 release

Hello all, just a quick post to let the community know the CentOS team made the latest release of Red Hat Enteprise Linux 5.4 available, as always free of charge, to the community with CentOS 5.4! In a nutshell what's new :

- KVM as a preview for the new virtualization technology in Enterprise Linux.

- ext4 as a preview of the Filesystem (yes fianlly!)

- Apache 2-2

- Kernel 2.6.18

- MySQL 5

And lot lot more new packages, so probably at this point you're wondering how to upgrade your CentOS 5.3 installation to 5.4, right? Well that's pretty easy, I've been busy today doing this myself on some of the production/test systems in our environment, the process is risk free but as always be sure to have a complete and up to date backup before doing anything!

Done with the backup? Ok do one more just to be sure and now open up a console if you're using a GUI and issue the following command :

  yum upgrade

One done reboot your system with :

  shutdown -r now

And finally check the release of your system with :

  shutdown -r now

cat /etc/redhat-release

Which should output something similar to :

CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

If you're curious about which packages has been upgraded/installed you can check the following log file

/var/log/yum.log

Well I hope this has been informative for you, happy upgrade!

Lethe.