The following guide will show you how to install a CentOS 5.5 64-bit Linux server based Alfresco ECM server. CentOS Linux distribution is amongst the most popular ones for its well known binary compatibility with major commercial Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS is pretty much same as RHEL only without Red Hat’s vendor branding and artwork. Major reasons why you want to use CentOS over some other free Linux distributions is its stability and what’s most important hardware compatibility. Big hardware vendors like HP, Dell, or IBM tend to release Linux drivers for specific distributions only so choosing a distribution that is fully compatible with the USA-based and leading Linux vendor Red Hat is likely a smart move.

Now, important point to say is that Alfresco loves 64-bits so you want to install it on 64-bit hardware, operating system and use 64-bit Java Virtual Machine. While it certainly can work on 32-bit systems for production use I recommend that you use 64-bit system. Lets begin with Alfresco prerequisites.
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