Johnny Hughes announced yesterday the launch of CentOS 4.7 for i386 and x86_64 architectures, the “Community ENTerprise Operating System”. CentOS is built from RHEL’s sources and CentOS 4.7 was born from the recompilation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 source code.

Its “updates” repository has the latest packages till September 12th. Talking about updates, probably the most important one is the fact that CentOS 4.7 comes with improved performance for the fully-virtualized guests. This is done thanks to the paravirtualized network and block device drivers.

CentOS 4.7 brings the latest edition of Firefox 3 and a technology preview of OpenOffice-2.0 in the updates repository. The possibility to install the preview alongside the OOo-1.1.5 version is given, but you can set it up alone too.

Password hashing with the SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions was added. The SHA hash functions were designed by NSA and these two cryptographic functions are 256 and respectively 512 bits long. Although there are no reported attacks related to the SHA-2 family (including SHA-256 and SHA-512), there is another hash function called SHA-3 that’s currently under development.

CentOS was created for users that don’t need commercial support but want a stable operating system that they can manage on their own. Full updates including hardware updates for the CentOS 4 branch will be supported until February 29, 2008. After this date, only maintenance updates will be provided till February 29, 2012.

You can find out more about this release in the official release announcement and on CentOS’s website.