Last week I bought a Nokia E71, a few days before the iPhone 3G was available in stores. You may think I must be crazy for not giving into Apple, but I have my reasons.

I had the following list of requirements:

• Full keyboard (and not an on-screen keyboard)
• OS that I could develop for (Symbian ?)
• Not based on Windows
• Needed Wifi, GPRS, UMTS
• Wanted an SSH client (preferably putty)
• USB connection and bluetooth
• Small enough to fit well in my pocket

A study from the University of Arizona (recently posted on slashdot) looked at weaknesses in package managers (and mirror setup). By becoming an official mirror and delaying or stalling a mirror's updates they tried to lower the security of servers using that mirror and increasing the window of opportunity for a successful attack.

In itself it is very useful to make people aware of weaknesses in technology or abuse of trust, but in this case (and certainly for CentOS) I think they overstated the impact or at least ignored mechanisms used to prevent possible security risks.

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

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:

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.

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.