The CentOS community is pretty limited in what we can do to the core distribution. Since our mantra is "aiming to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux" we cannot fix bugs or improve the CentOS core without waiting for Red Hat to make those modifications first. We have limited leverage and a 6-month release cycle against us.

But that is not the complete truth, Red Hat usually has an internal, a vendor and a public beta period and everything that is found within that time-frame might get fixed before it is being shipped (and frozen) for the next 6 months.

Today RHEL 5.3 Beta was announced with a lot of interesting improvements.

I just released mrepo 0.8.6 with RHEL 4.7's RHN/up2date code included which makes mrepo work on other distributions without requiring to copy those libraries.

Some of the highlights include:

• Support for RHEL5 and CentOS-5.
• Added YaST Online Update support.
• Added fuseiso support (root access no longer needed).
• Added unionfs support to merge ISOs to a single tree.
• Faster relinking of repositories.
• Caching of directory indexes to prevent regenerating repositories.
  

I am planning to do an mrepo 0.8.5 release very soon. For those new to mrepo, mrepo is a python tool that can download RPMs from repositories, but also from Red Hat Network and Yast Online Update (or CentOS or OpenSUSE for that matter), mount ISO images if needed, and create repositories out of it.

For the people that have heard of Red Hat Satellite, consider it a (free) light version that only covers downloading the updates and making it available.

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 ...

On the heels of the CentOS 5.2 release last month, the first spin of CentOS 4.7 went out to the QA team yesterday and if there are not too many hurdles in the QA process CentOS 4.7 might be out soon.

As a teaser, here is the upstream announcement as well as the release notes.

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:

I have been playing with (and talking about) this before, so why not take it to the next level and share it with the larger CentOS and RHEL community ?

The CentOS community is pretty limited in what we can do to the core OS. Since our mantra is "aiming to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux" we cannot fix bugs or improve the CentOS core without waiting for RHEL to make those modifications first. We have limited leverage and a 6-month release cycle against us.

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

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/

The reasons for CentOS on your server seem compelling, but the same reasons apply for a desktop or your laptop. Especially for people that require a stable environment and have no need to a (bi-)yearly upgrade that may break or turn your world upside down.

As more people buy laptops instead of desktop systems, and because laptops come as a collection of hardware, it would be nice if we, the CentOS community, would actively start documenting our experience with CentOS on our laptops.

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.

One of the ways to promote CentOS is to have CentOS appear in shops and libraries. Currently our local bookshop has a few titles about Fedora and RHEL, but they do not mention CentOS at all.

These books are real bibles containing more than 1000 pages. They go into details about everything, but they fail to mention the RHEL rebuild distributions like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

Something is going on here ?