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2 of my 3 machines are updated - my x86_64 still needs to be updated, the iso is slowly coming in sure - I could yum update, but I need the isos anyway to burn for people - so I download the isos and set up my own repo to yum update

Red Hat changed some of the libraries, something RHEL is not suppose to do - but they did it for a justifiable reason, they did it so they could package Firefox 3 and the latest OO.o.

Anywhoo - it did cause me to need to recompile one third party package, but that really wasn't a big deal - all it needed was a recompile.

The only other issue was my wifi driver. RHEL kept the kernel version the same, but back ported some fixes from later kernel version into the kernel. So - my wifi driver which compiled perfectly under 5.1 failed to compile under 5.2 until I went in and commented out a conditional in a header file that said to do something different for older kernels, as RHEL fixed the issue in the kernel that the header file conditional was suppose to address.

That one bothered me a little bit. It was simple enough to deal with - but the whole point of keeping the kernel version the same is to avoid this kind of issue. If they are going to keep the version the same but change the kernel API they might as well just use a newer kernel. Since the issue was not a security hole, IMHO they should have left that patch out of the kernel until RHEL 6 (when they will have a newer kernel anyway).

But once the third party package and that kernel driver was rebuilt - I was able to update the laptop no problem.

my lan server did not need anything, very smooth update, and nothing broke.

My x86_64 desktop should go no problem, I'm using the same third party software on it - but that's just a recompile (and I can compile it before upgrading) and the only 3rd party driver I'm using is nvidia, which reports say doesn't need any header file modification, it just works in RHEL/CentOS 5.2 (with the obvious kernel relink).

Overall, at least for me - it seems to be a smooth upgrade, as expected, breaking the third party app is understandable to get the new FireFox and OpenOffice - changing the kernel definition they probably should not have done, though it really only affects some third party drivers (and most of those are fine) and is easily worked around.

Oh - I couldn't keep my laptop at 5.1. If I had paid for RHEL - they will keep providing security patches for 5.1 but CentOS does not, so I had to move it to 5.2 to get security updates. I suppose I could have grabbed the src.rpm's for the rhel security updates myself, but that's too much work.