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.

Since 10 years I am praying for a much more convenient email program, one that understands my relation with incoming mail and incoming folders. Let me explain...

I get lots of mails from different sources. Some are addressing me, others have me in Cc:. Some are from mailinglist that are very important to me (because I am responsible for answering), others I just want to follow up if I have some time. My email-client however treats all these mails the same way.

The CentOS project is looking for more slogans that may end up on promotional material (eg media, flyers, posters or stickers). We already collected a few funny, ironic, sarcastic or even distasteful ones.

Feel free to visit our Slogans wiki page for a good laugh or rude offenses and add your own slogan by sending them to this thread.

I was surprised of the enthusiasm and feedback I got during and after my Dstat presentation at FOSDEM 2008. Even though I revisited my older slides and made the presentation shorter, I was not as prepared as I was with previous presentations but apparently that did not affect audience participation :-)

In an earlier discussion about commenting Kris mentioned using pingback, but...

Spam is a problematic issue. I had to enable comment moderation not because the Captcha was too easy to come by, but because apparently real people are adding genuine comments and are actively abusing the URL field to point to their commercial (or virus-infected) websites.

Today I was surprised a second time with something I did not expect from 7-zip (but tried anyway). Let me start with the first time 7zip surprised me.

Imagine you *only* have a Windows system available, you have got a 640MB ISO image that contains a single 5MB file and you have a very slow network connection to the Linux system that requires this 5MB file.

Somewhat in the heat of the moment I decided to move to Drupal6. I was not really planning on doing it until after a few months, but somehow the excitement took over to just make a copy of the database and test-run it on the copy.

I started over with the fresh Drupal6 codebase, copied over the relevant content from my settings.php and pointed it to the copy of the database. Without installing any module I just did an update and it simply worked.

Dear Kris,

Would it be possible to comment an article on the originating blog instead of creating your own article. I found it very annoying when you did that to me, and now I see you doing it again :-)

I prefer discussions being held on the original article's blog (so people reading it can read your remarks) rather than having comments being posted as blog articles on different blogs. (That would only work for people reading a Planet anyway)

It is a common problem with packagers. Developers release a package 0.4, then release a 0.5a (or 0.5pre1 or 0.5rc1) and then release the stable 0.5. Of course, when packaging you have to foresee such problems and maintain a proper upgrade path from 0.4 to 0.5pre1 to 0.5rc1 and to 0.5. Often that means finding the meaning of a release string.

(-: sɯɹoɟʇɐld ʇɟosoɹɔıɯ uo sʇıɯıl uoıʇɐɔılddɐ ǝɯos ʇıɥ noʎ uǝɥʍ ɟo sɹɐǝʍ ʎllɐnsn ʇuǝɯǝʇıɔxǝ ǝɥʇ

/ʇǝu˙ʇxǝʇdılɟ˙uǝ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ

:ǝʇıs sıɥʇ ʇɐ ʇno ʇɹɐǝɥ ɹnoʎ ʇɐǝ uɐɔ noʎ ˙ƃuıʇıɹʍ uʍop-ǝpısdn ɹoɟ ʇǝs ɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɐ sı ǝɹǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʇ ʇno punoɟ ʇsnɾ ı

After 2 months of having a Wii, I can admit that I am a bit addicted to it. But not in a way that one would expect though. I don't play that many games even though I did collect a few (= 7).

I try to use the Wii daily for 5 minutes of Wii Fitness and once a week I play some more tennis to try to reach my old hi-score of 2209 points. (I dropped to 2105 :-/)

We also like to follow-up on the voting channel and see how we did and vote for the new questions. It is a quick 2-minute break twice a week and it is fun to see what your partner and others think about silly questions.

Since I started contract work for a new customer and have been offered a Windows Thinkpad to connect to the internal network, I have been looking at ways to make my life more comfortable. Putty is now my window to the world work so let's look at how I can make Putty nicer to work with by tweaking its configuration.

PS: Some of these options work equally well for Putty on Linux, put there is little use for that combination.

I always wonder who has the time to come up with these funny youtube video ideas and has the time, resources and character to implement it.

The graphics look pretty good Wii-wise even though the ideas are plain stupid, but funny :-) Enjoy!

...with love.

Would it be too much to ask if new Drupal releases could be announced on Freshmeat ? The current Drupal Freshmeat-record is out of date (last updated 3 may 2006) and still refers to 4.7.0.

Having a seperate branch for both the 4.7.x and 5.x stable releases as well as the 6.x development releases would be great. Links to release notes and downloads would be superb ! And a short description of the changes gain you additional karma points.

LinuxWorld Expo Brussels this year will take place on wednesday 19 and thursday 20 March 2008 in Brussels Kart Expo. Last year's edition was lacking any Open Source cooperation and this year the organisers acknowledged the benefit of an Open Source pavilion on the LinuxWorld exhibition.

Having this Open Source pavilion allows us (the Open Source community) to showcase some technologies and communities on an exhibition floor that is primarily dominated by sales and marketing people and that is aiming towards the business world.