Remember when I wrote an opinion piece about Ubuntu LTS titled Ubuntu's need to catch a wave ?

That night someone, nicknamed mapnjd, submitted the article to Slashdot with the above title (Dag Wieers intelligent swipe at Ubuntu) but I guess the Slashdot editors thought it would be a better headline if they phrased it Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal ... and overnight I became an Ubuntu-hater ...

At the 2008 Red Hat summit in Boston, Red Hat outlined to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux for new hardware and installation media one year longer than it did in the past.

This is a major event. In the past Red Hat offered new hardware support, bugfixes and feature enhancements (dubbed full support) for 3 years after the initial release. But now that will be for 4 years after initial release. New installation media will be release up to 5 years after initial release !

Everytime I am surprised that people don't know that apt-get works on RPM-based distributions and works much better than the alternatives. Especially in a CentOS/RHEL environment where you have various distribution releases running, apt-rpm allows you to use the same apt version and the same apt features across CentOS/RHEL 2.1, 3, 4 and 5.

In an attempt to persuade you to try out apt, let me denounce some myths about the current apt-rpm:

If you use RHEL or CentOS a lot and you often find yourself looking for good information on the web about either CentOS or RHEL, you might find the following Firefox search addons very useful.

Here's my overview, sorted by importance:

Red Hat Knowledgebase search

Search Red Hat's extensive knowledgebase, documentation and many other resources

The latest edition of Linuxtag was very productive. During the 4 days the CentOS crew managed to do several things, including:

• professional booth with a 24" screen/laptop setup that we can now reuse for other events around Europe
• proper template slides for events like this (also now a German translation thanks to Ralph and Felix)
• well received "CentOS and Enterprise Linux" presentation
• strengthened our ties with the Fedora project
• have a much better solution for our CentOS media (both printing and burning)
  

The subject may sound weird to you, but all the arguments that free CentOS from becoming the next Microsoft can be used to to counter the pundits that position Red Hat as being the next Microsoft.

(You may think this statement is so nineties, but a recent opinion piece that got onto Slashdot prompted similar comments)

We can only ask ourselves why someone would want us to believe that Red Hat is the next Microsoft, but let me reiterate why neither CentOS nor Red Hat will be the next Microsoft:

Let me play devil's advocate here. Mark Shuttleworth's recent pledge to join a synchronised release plan for Enterprise Linux distributions is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.

Let me explain.

RHEL 5.2 beta is released and many interesting features and software updates are expected.

It is very unusual for software to be updated (instead of bugfix backports) in a Red Hat Enterprise distribution (or CentOS for that matter) but there are exceptional cases where this makes more sense than the alternative.

Red Hat has decided that for desktop applications they can make that exception, meaning Red Hat and CentOS desktop users (me!) will soon be able to use a recent Firefox, Thunderbird or OpenOffice.

Location: Hotel Torrequebrada, Avenida del Sol, 29630 Benalmádena, Malaga, ES
URL: http://www.europe.redhat.com/mktg/partnersummit/

It was exciting when a year ago at LinuxWorld Expo London we heard a rumor that Oracle was going to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was surprising to find out that this rumor was not entirely as well-intended and supportive as it sounded.

Instead of helping the community, Oracle was directly attacking Red Hat with its own product as if it was showing the world that Open Source has no value and that even Oracle could run away with Red Hat's crown jewels and customers. A hostile take-over attempt of Red Hat by Oracle.

I stand corrected. For some reason Amazon does not show excerpts when looking just for CentOS. And the list of books that match CentOS is incorrect. Now if I redo my search query using CentOS Linux the real search-inside-the-book mechanism starts to work. Maybe it requires at least 2 keywords?

The result is a shining 15 books that contain CentOS in one way or the other.