作为一个团体,CentOS是一个开源软件贡献者和用户的社区.典型的CentOS用户包括这样一些组织和个人,他们并不需要专门的商业支持就能开展成功的业务.CentOS是Red Hat Enterprise Linux的100%兼容的重新组建,并完全符合Red Hat的再发行要求.CentOS面向那些需要企业级操作系统稳定性的人们,而且并不涉及认证和支持方面的开销.Johnny Hughes has announced the availability of the first beta release of CentOS 5, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2: "The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64. This is a beta frozen release. Which implies there are known security issues with packages in this release, and there will be no updates provided in order to resolve those issues. This release is not meant to be used in production and there are no upgrade paths guaranteed from this release. As a user, you should consider this beta release as unsuitable for deployment but usable in a test environment to look at new technologies and changes in the distribution since CentOS 4."

Read the full release announcement and release notes for more information. Interested beta testers can download the DVD media via BitTorrent: CentOS-4.92-i386-bin-DVD (3.34GB), CentOS-4.92-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso (3.88GB).