Scientific Linux Marches On While CentOS 6 Is Still M.I.A.

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 in November after it was available as beta for months prior. It took a few months for the Scientific Linux developers to release Scientific Linux 6.0, as their community rebuild of the RHEL6.0 packages, and shortly thereafter Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 was released. The Scientific Linux developers are now preparing to do their 6.1 release while the well-known CentOS team still hasn't even done their CentOS 6.0 release yet with eight months having passed since the official RHEL release.

Troy Dawson of the Scientific Linux project announced yesterday the second alpha release of Scientific Linux 6.1. "All of the packages have gone through much more testing. There are still a couple of packages we are investigating, so we are still in Alpha stage and not Beta stage."

The release announcement of Scientific Linux 6.1 Alpha 2 can be read here. Will Scientific Linux 6.1 be officially released even before CentOS 6.0 makes it out the door? Scientific Linux 6.1 still needs to go through its beta process, but after repeated delays it looks like CentOS-6 may finally be tipping up.

According to the CentOS 6.0 QA calendar, the quality assurance sign-off for the 6.0 ISO images is supposed to take place today. If that goes well, the calendar shows the sync process beginning to internal mirrors followed by syncing to external mirrors beginning next week. A blog post by Karanbir Singh indicated that a CentOS 6.1 release could come a few weeks after CentOS 6.0 being officially released, but no dates for that are yet on the calendar.