As you've probably seen if you're subscribed to the CentOS announce list (or if you just rsync/mirror the whole CentOS tree) , the CentOS 6.0 LiveCD was released last monday. This is the first of our CentOS custom spins ! While I'm writing that blog post, the CentOS 6.0 LiveDVD is on its way to the external mirrors too and will normally be announced shortly (when enough mirrors will have it) ! It will be the second CentOS respin and we have more in the pipe for you ! As Karanbir announced it in the 6.0 release mail , we planned also to provide two other spins : the minimal one and the lws one. Good news is that the minimal one is almost finished and being intensively tested. If things don't change (or bugs appear during QA), the iso image will be only \~250Mb for the i386 arch and \~300Mb for the x86_64 one. It's meant to be used as a real basic CentOS system (even less packages that the @core group on a normal install if used with the proper kickstart invocation !) : 186 packages only on your disk. You'll have a very basic CentOS system with only openssh-server and yum. We are even testing the luks/lvm/md devices combination to be sure to meet your needs.

The next custom respin (LWS code name - for LightWeigth Server edition) will still be a CD iso image (but pushed to the limit) that will include basic server packages, more or less in the idea of the ServerCD that existed during the CentOS 4.x days ... That one still needs to be finished while work has already being done.

Stay tuned for more informations when it will be pushed to mirrors and announced .. all that at the same time as 6.1 and 5.7 (in parallel) builds ..Interesting times ! :-)