The backlight of my Thinkpad X200s stopped working reliably a few weeks ago and before using the warranty and shipping it back, I bought a Thinkpad X201 as a replacement. This system comes with a Qualcomm Gobi 2000 WWAN module (despite the box mentioning Ericsson F3507g) and while a driver exists, the device is something weird.

Your systems may already have picked it up, but if you haven't noticed, CentOS 5.5 has been released. You can find more information in the RHEL 5.5 release announcement.

Additionally, the CentOS community compiles its own list of interesting tidbits in the CentOS 5.5 release notes, which is an interesting read as well. The CentOS 5.5 LiveCD is released at the same time and has a its own release notes in the wiki.

Earlier than I had expected Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 beta. This release is available to everyone through the Red Hat public FTP server.

The release announcement briefly summarizes important changes, but I will blog later about the details of this release.

Exciting times ahead...

Today another update release of RHEL5 was born.

These (minor) update releases typically provide feature enhancements, bugfixes and new hardware support. And as such come as a set of new installation media (CDs and DVD). We already discussed the RHEL 5.5 Beta release not so long ago, and apart from stabilizing the product, a lot of what was known from that Beta is true for the real RHEL 5.5 release.

If you happen to come across a pure 64bit system that was installed the default way and includes lots of 32bit stuff. And you know for a fact all the 32bit functionality is not needed, just proceed to:

[root@system ~]# rpm -qa --qf '%{name}.%{arch}\n' | grep 'i[36]86$' | xargs rpm -e


Clean and simple...

As expected Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta. The Release Notes and Technical notes are included in the above link.

This beta update includes:

• New hardware driver support (pmcraid, ibmvfs, bfa, be2iscsi)
• Updated hardware support (too many to list)
• Kickstart improvements to logging post-install
• Run-time memory allocation for KVM guests (memory ballooning)
• PCI passthrough improvements (hotswapping PCI devices, 1:1 performance improvements)
• Detecting kernel tasks stuck in the uninterruptible sleep state (D-state)
• Improved CFQ I/O scheduler performance
• Kernel CIFS updates
• Software updates (openoffice, metacity, samba, freeradius)

So, CentOS 5.4 has been released to mirrors and will be available soon as updates to your existing systems. This ends about 6 weeks of suspended security fixes, although some security fixes were released in the CentOS 5.3 repository before the actual 5.4 release was ready.

Most of what is new can be found from my earlier RHEL5.4 release blog post.

Enjoy!

I noticed that I am no longer listed on Planet CentOS as I resigned from the team.

So you'll have to either read Planet Grep (Belgian Open Source aggregator) or have to come back here to read this blog :-)

I previously blogged about how we are promoting WiiPresent at FrOSCon 2009 in Sankt-Augustin, Germany. We give away Wii Remotes and bluetooth dongles to speakers and every conference room has a system hooked up to the beamer that is running a custom CentOS-based LiveCD (actually a LiveUSB) image.

So it looks like we are going to have CentOS 4.8 before RHEL 5.4 after all. I blogged about the big 4.8 release delays a week ago and we can expect CentOS 4.8 on Friday if all goes well. Maybe the weekend ?

If you remember that RHEL 4.8 was released on 18 May 2009, that makes CentOS 4.8 three months (or 95 days) late. Of course it is impossible to release a rebuild at the same time as the original, but 3 months is a lot of QA :-)

After the big CentOS 5.3 release delay in the beginning of 2009, the community witnesses history repeating with CentOS 4.8 being delayed even longer. It is unfortunate that 13 weeks after Red Hat released RHEL 4.8, CentOS is unable to release their own rebuild.

Now that the cat is out of the bag I can discuss one part of what bothered me within the CentOS project for more than 2 years. Something which was unknown to outsiders, but also not discussable inside of the project because of the fear of the repercussions of bringing up this topic during a meeting. If you cannot discuss, you cannot fix.

I often use my cellphone to connect my laptop to the Internet on the train or when I am in the car, not driving. Fabian was interested in the details and since I promised him this almost a year ago, without further ado...

So here is an overview of how I configure my Nokia E71 to be used as a modem (over bluetooth) with my laptop. First make sure you have bluez-utils installed by running either apt-get install bluez-utils or yum install bluez-install

Then check if you can find your cellphone by doing:

I noticed there was something wrong with Planet CentOS this evening, and apparently the CentOS website says:

The CentOS websites are current down for some unscheduled maintenance, we hope to have services restored as soon as possible.

But at the same time if you go to www.redhat.com, you get a:

redhat.com will be back soon.Thank you for your patience.

I think there's plenty of food for conspiracy theorists in there :-) Maybe CentOS is running in Red Hat's datacenter ?

Could it really ?

About 18 months ago I blogged about the fact there was no book that focused on CentOS. There were books about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which would be the same, but none of them had CentOS on the cover. None would discuss the community aspect, where to get help or why it matters in size.