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

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:

For not giving in to politics, arm-wrestling and dirty practices that some company wants to cover up so badly.

Update: And thank you Brazil !

Today we had the need to mount a filesystem from a system that was almost completely isolated and instead of having to transfer a huge amount of data over a tunneled SSH connection, I thought, why not pursue mounting NFS over an SSH tunnel.

Since NFS4 by default does TCP if both client and server can do that, this would be the perfect opportunity to test the new capability. In fact, it should not be hard at all.

Finally I have some good news in the comment spam saga, my latest article brought some interesting comments and eventually lead to a bugfix for Drupal 6.

This however means that Drupal 5 users in a similar environment (high PageRank and unregistered comments) may still be affected. The filter module may help, but will also not help in the PageRank front as it may not differentiate normal links and contributed links, something Drupal 6.3 will do out of the box as intended.

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.

Closing my eyes during the Portishead concert warped me back more than a decade, I must be getting old.

Elise expressed exactly how I experienced the concert.

Can't wait for the Massive Attack concert in August. Only Tricky is missing to complete the list of 1995.

Things are getting worse at the spam comment front, whereas I used to get about 2 to 3 spam comments a day (or comments that look very real but advertise a commercial website nevertheless), I now have attracted more people that leave unwanted comments. Up to 20 a day, worse than my mailbox *with* spamfilter.

This is bad...

Finally FrOSCon made available the video of my first dstat presentation, which was also my first presentation at an Open Source conference *ever* !

I am a bit disappointed that I did not have access to it before doing the same presentation at 3 different other venues, as I could have learned much from it. It shows that I had not slept that night because of the stress and sleepless nights turn me hyperactive :-)

I know most of you don't care about my alpine fetish, but this goes out to my fellow alpine users :-)

Pine was almost dead for years and likely because of that I never reconsidered optimising my mail-usage. With alpine's rebirth I have been busy improving my daily overload of personal messages.

Again for the people that missed it, if your Open Source non-profit organisation or project wants to make some free advertisements at LinuxWorld, don't forget to bring your posters and flyers so we have them ready for visitors at the Open Source pavilion.

The audience is mostly business-focused, so you are welcome to promote your project/organisation in person at the booth or give away flyers at the booth.

For the conference part of the Open Source pavilion, the following presentations will be given:

• Wednesday 19/3
  • 11h: Profoss - Raphael Bauduin
  • 13h: OpenDoc Society - Machtelt Garrels
  • 14h: Drupal - Roel Guldemond
  • 15h: CentOS - Dag Wieers
• Thursday 20/3
  • 11h: Open Source at Hogent - Ilse Baetsle
  • 13h: Ubuntu LTS - Serge van Ginderachter
  • 14h: Joomla - Johan Janssens
  • 15h: OpenQRM - Kris Buytaert

As a fervent user of tabs in my browser, this article caught my attention. It explains in great detail all the different changes and improvements to Firefox that affect its memory usage.

At some point you start to wonder how it could have gotten this worse, but it usually takes a big swing in one direction to get corrective actions and a joint focus on what was neglected.

As announced before, 2008 will be the first year that LinuxWorld Expo Brussels has an Open Source pavilion to promote Open Source in an Enterprise environment.

The RFP for presentations is over since some time, but the pavilion also has some space for promoting and discussing Open Source software. So if your non-profit project somehow fits into what business need, you could use this area to put up a poster or distribute flyers.