After Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 released in May 19, 2011. Finally, CentOS 6.1 which is an Enterprise Linux distribution based on the freely available sources from RHEL, released in December 9, 2011.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.1 install media for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Release Notes for 6.1 are availble at http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.1 - we recommend everyone looks through those once.

CentOS-6.1 is based on the upstream release EL 6.1 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

Just before CentOS 6.1 release, Red Hat released EL 6.2 in December 6, 2011, just 3 days earlier. Since upstream has a 6.2 version already released, CentOS team will be using a Continuous Release repository for 6.1 to bring all 6.2 and post 6.2 security updates to all 6.1 users, till such time as CentOS-6.2 is released itself.