Dear CentOS enthusiast,

For those of you who celebrate various things at this time of year, we wish you a wonderful time with family and friends.

IN THIS EDITION:

News

December, as usual, was very slow around here, with many people taking some time off around the end of the year. As such, I don't have much news to report this time.

Red Hat engineering continues to work towards on the tooling necessary to have an active CentOS Stream, and we hope to have an announcement about that this time next month.

Continuing the push for greater transparency and community participation, the Board of Directors has published the minutes from the December board meeting.

Releases and updates

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during December:

Wed Dec 11 2019: CEEA-2019:4155 CentOS 6 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035578.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEEA-2019:4252 CentOS 6 ca-certificates Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035582.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEEA-2019:4161 CentOS 7 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035586.html

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during December:

Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3888 Important CentOS 7 ghostscript Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035560.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3981 Important CentOS 7 389-ds-base Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035566.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3976 Low CentOS 7 tcpdump Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035570.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3979 Important CentOS 7 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035574.html

Fri Dec 6 2019: CESA-2019:4024 Important CentOS 7 SDL Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035576.html

Wed Dec 11 2019: CESA-2019:4108 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035577.html

Wed Dec 11 2019: CESA-2019:4152 Important CentOS 6 nss-softokn Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035579.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4205 Important CentOS 6 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035580.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4254 Moderate CentOS 6 freetype Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035581.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4256 Important CentOS 6 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035585.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss-util Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035587.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss-softokn Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035589.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035590.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4326 Important CentOS 7 fribidi Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035591.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4240 Critical CentOS 7 openslp Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035592.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4148 Important CentOS 7 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035594.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4107 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035595.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during December:

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3971 CentOS 7 curl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035558.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3982 CentOS 7 selinux-policy BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035559.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3969 CentOS 7 samba BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035561.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3975 CentOS 7 libvirt BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035562.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3984 CentOS 7 pacemaker BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035563.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3974 CentOS 7 mutter BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035564.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3972 CentOS 7 sssd BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035565.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3983 CentOS 7 util-linux BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035567.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3985 CentOS 7 iproute BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035568.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3980 CentOS 7 opencryptoki BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035569.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3970 CentOS 7 ca-certificates BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035571.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3973 CentOS 7 sos BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035572.html

Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3977 CentOS 7 numactl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035573.html

Fri Dec 6 2019: CEBA-2019:4106 CentOS 7 kernel BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035575.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4251 CentOS 6 net-snmp BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035583.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4253 CentOS 6 curl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035584.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4150 CentOS 7 python-requests BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035588.html

Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4246 CentOS 7 open-vm-tools BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035593.html

Other releases

The following releases also happened during December:

Thu Dec 26 2019: CentOS Linux 8.0.1905 Continuous Release Populated - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035596.html

Events

December was very quiet, as it is in most years. If you represented CentOS at an event in December, please do let us know!

We have published a number of interviews from the Student Cluster Competition at the recent SuperComputing event in Denver:

University of Washington Student Supercomputing

North Carolina State Student Supercomputing

Shangjai Jiao Tong University Student Supercomputing

FOSDEM 2020, and Dojo

In just under a month, we will, as usual, have a table at the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium. This will be held on the first weekend in February, which is the 1st and 2nd of February, 2020. We'll be sharing the space with our friends from Fedora. Please drop by and see us.

And, on the day before FOSDEM starts, we'll be having our annual Dojo at the Marriott Grand Place. That's Friday, January 31st, 2020. The agenda is on the event listing page, and we would love to have you there.

We'll be having a lightning talks section this year, so if you have something you'd like to present about, but don't have enough for a full presentation, bring your notes and your ideas! Tell us about your favorite projects, your interesting discoveries, or your perplexing problem.

Attendance is free, but we would appreciate it if you register, so that we know how many people to plan for. We have limited space, so register soon before we are all full.

See you in Brussels!

Host a Dojo

If your University, company, or research organization, wants to host a CentOS Dojo, we would love to hear from you. You'll need a space where 100-200 people can attend technical talks, and someone who is able to work with us on logistics and talk acquisition. We'll help promote the event, and work with you to craft the schedule of talks. Drop us a note on the CentOS-Promo mailing list - https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo - with your proposal.

SIG Reports

The SIGs - special interest groups - are where most of the interesting stuff in CentOS happens. They are communities packaging and testing layered projects on top of CentOS, and ensuring that they work reliably.

The PaaS SIG has provided their report as a separate blog post, and the Virtualization and Software Collections SIG reports are provided below.

Virtualization SIG

Purpose

Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based virtualization

applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Virtualization

Membership Update

We are always looking for new members.

omachace__ joining Virt SIG for oVirt project volunteering for providing

ansible-runner related and mod_wsgi into Virt SIG

Welcoming Miguel Barroso mbarroso to Virt SIG for oVirt

Releases and Packages

oVirt

* upstream released oVirt 4.3.7

* Working on getting oVirt CentOS Stream packages, particularly oVirt 4.4

https://blogs.ovirt.org/2019/09/top-7-things-to-look-forward-to-at-ovirt-conference/

https://blogs.ovirt.org/2019/09/ovirt-and-centos-stream/

Xen

* Xen 4.12.1 available on CentOS 7

* Regular updates to 4.8, 4.10, 4.12 for security updates

* Upstream Xen 4.13 nearing release

Health and Activity

The Virtualization SIG remains fairly healthy. All the projects within

the SIG are updating regularly on biweekly meetings.

oVirt had a conference in Rome on 4 Oct.

oVirt also now has a new driver installer for Windows. If you have a VM

with the old drivers, it is recommended to uninstall them before

installing new ones.

The Xen Developer Summit was held 9-11 July in Chicago.

After an online discussion / survey, it was decided that the "primary

supported" version of Xen would always be the most recent version of

Xen-1. The current "primary" version is 4.8; once Xen 4.13 comes out

upstream (probably next week) we'll move this to 4.12.1. After that,

when 4.14 comes out, we'll update to the latest version of 4.13, and so on.

Issues for the Board

Both Xen and oVirt waiting for CentOS 8 support in the CBS. oVirt using

copr as a work-around for now.

Software Collections SIG

Purpose

The Software Collections SIG will provide an upstream development area for various software collections and related tools. Developers can build on and extend existing SCLs, so they don't need to re-invent the wheel or take responsibility for packaging unnecessary dependencies.

Details at https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SCLo

Releases:

The upstream release of RHSCL 3.4 was rebuilt and made available in the testing repositories since public beta. This release include collections of Nginx 1.16, NodeJS 12, PHP 7.3 and PostgreSQL 12.

Maven 3.6 was also included upstream, but due to rebuilding and packaging difficulties, it is not available as of this report.

The successfully rebuilt collections are in process of being tested and released, and should be available on public mirrors shortly after this report is published.

Contributing

As with any open source project, there's a lot more than just code. If you want to get involved, but you're not a programmer or packager, there's still a ton of places where you can plug in.

Design - Graphic and design elements for the product itself, the website, materials for events, and so on, are always a great need. This is true of any open source community, where the focus on code can tend to neglect other aspects.

Events - While CentOS has an official presence at a few events during the year, we want a wider reach. If you're planning to attend an event, and want to represent CentOS in some way, get in touch with us on the centos-promo mailing list to see how we can support you.

Promotion - The Promo SIG does a lot in addition to just events. This includes this newsletter, our social media presence, blog posts, and various other things. We need your help to expand this effort.

Documentation - Any open source project is only as good as its documentation. If people can't use it, it doesn't matter. If you're a writer, you are in great demand.

If any of these things are of interest to you, please come talk to us on the centos-devel mailing list, the centos-promo mailing list, or any of the various social media channels.

We look forward to hearing from you, and helping you figure out where you can fit in.