It hardly seems possible that it’s already October. September (and the first few days of October) was very busy in CentOS news.
Events
We had our first in-person event in almost two years, last week in Seattle, and we have two upcoming events.
October CentOS Dojo
Later this week we will be holding the October CentOS Dojo online.
This dojo will feature an AMA (ask me anything) session with the board of directors, and 9 technical sessions on topics ranging from EPEL to Automotive Linux to Modules.
Full details, including the schedule and free registration, are available on the CentOS Wiki.
Open Source Summit
Last week in Seattle, the Linux Foundation held Open Source Summit. CentOS had a presence there at the Red Hat booth. Thanks to all of you who dropped by with questions, or just to chat. We look forward to seeing all of you at more events in the coming months.
All Things Open
We hope you’ll come see us at All Things Open, two weeks from now in Raleigh, North Carolina. We’ll once again be at the Red Hat booth, where we’ll be talking about CentOS Stream and our various CentOS SIGs.
Fedora Linux 35 Release Party
Our friends over in the Fedora project have released Fedora Linux 35 Beta, and will release the GA very soon. They’ve invited us to join them at their release party on November 12th, to celebrate another great release.
Project News
Build for CentOS Stream 9
On September 3rd, Fabian announced that SIGs can now request a 9s tag in order to build against/for CentOS Stream 9. The full details of this are available on the centos-devel mailing list
dnf-automatic
Pat started a very interesting discussion on centos-devel this week about the possibility of making dnf automatic a default in Stream 9.
Please do read the discussion so far, and chime in if you have an opinion on this important decision.
Hyperscale Live DVDs
Neal has announced new LiveDVD images from the Hyperscale SIG. GNOME and KDE variants are available. Details are available in this thread.
sigs.centos.org
The new sigs.centos.org site was announced a few days ago. This site will be a place where SIGs can publish documentation sourced out of a Git repo. If your SIG wants to take advantage of this new resource, please see the thread on centos-devel for details.
Board of Directors September meeting minutes
The minutes from the September Board of Diretors meeting have been posted to the blog.
I’d like to remind you that Board meetings are now public, and you’re encouraged to attend if you have any interest in how the project is governed. Watch the centos-devel mailing list for the announcement of the next board meeting.
The board meets on the second Wednesday of each month (That’s October 13th this month) at 20:00 UTC.
SIG Reports
CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are the best place to get involved in the CentOS Project, in the area of your interest. This month we have reports from four SIGs, and also some notes from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) team.
- Hyperscale SIG quarterly report
- Automotive SIG quarterly report
- Kmods SIG quarterly report
- Software Collections SIG quarterly report
- CPE Weekly Update, week of September 27th
Get Involved
There’s a number of places where you can get involved around the CentOS community.
CentOS Stream Contributions
Contributing changes to CentOS Stream is the way to influence not only future releases of CentOS Stream itself, but also Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the various downstream rebuild projects that derive from RHEL. See the contributor’s guide for details on how to get onboarded and contribute your first change.
SIG meetings
Each of our Special Interest Groups has regular meetings where you can find out what’s happening in the SIG, and where you can get involved.
The full meeting schedule is on the CentOS website. Most meetings happen in #centos-meeting on the libera.chat IRC network.
Newsletter
Each month, we send out this newsletter to the centos-newsletter mailing list, as well as various other places. We always need more help with this effort, including gathering important stories, writing the newsletter itself, and providing translations. If you’d like to get involved, please subscribe to the centos-promo mailing list and introduce yourself.
Work on each newsletter begins as soon as the previous one is sent out, so now is the perfect time to get involved.
Test and report
Perhaps the most important part of the CentOS community is all of the users. Installing CentOS Linux or CentOS Stream, using it, and reporting about your experience, is central to making it better for everyone.
Additional detail about where and how to report problems may be found on the ReportBugs page in the wiki.
Stay in Touch
There’s many ways to stay in touch with the CentOS community.
Like many open source projects, the most important place is the various mailing lists. The most important of these are the centos@centos.org list and the centos-devel list, which are focused on user support and developer interactions, respectively.
We have a presence on several social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.
And the CentOS Forums are another place where there’s an active community, asking and answering questions on a variety of CentOS-related topics.
You can find the discussion forum that’s best suited to your preferred communication style.
As always, thanks for being part of the CentOS Community.
Rich, for the CentOS Project
I thought CentOS6 was just what I needed. When the repositories were shut down and my eight year old machine died, I promptly bought a new machine running CentOS8. I don't like it. Octave does not work, though it claims to be there. The nice user interface is gone. You no longer support the small researcher who likes having the UNIX utilities, though they still remain.