CentOS Pulse #1801 - 5 June 2018

Dear CentOS Enthusiast,

This is the inaugural edition of the rebooted CentOS newsletter. As some of you will no doubt remember, we used to have a newsletter roughly every month, but this was discontinued about 8 years ago. We're starting it again, in an attempt to highlight and celebrate the many things that are happening in CentOS - at the core level, across all of our SIGs, and in our wider user community.

7.5.1804 Release

On Thursday May 10th, we announced the immediate availability of CentOS 7.5.1804. This is the latest release of CentOS, and is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 release. You can read more about this release in several places:

Pablo has also posted to the blog requesting feedback as you try out 7.5.1804 on your armhfp devices.

CentOS SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where most of the day-to-day work on CentOS happens. You can read more about SIGs in the CentOS Wiki.

If you would like to have a message from your SIG here, please contact Rich Bowen (rbowen@centosproject.org) before the next newsletter.

Ansible and the Configuration Mangement SIG

In a recent email, the Configuration Management SIG discussed how Ansible should be handled in CentOS 7 going forward, given the changes to how Red Hat is packaging it in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5:

Cloud SIG

The Cloud SIG recently welcomed participation from the CloudStack community, who are trying to provide consistent packages for CentOS, as well as other distros.

On the OpenStack front, a test day schedule was announced in conjunction with the RDO community. Test days include a demo OpenStack cloud, running the latest version, so that you can participate in testing without having to deploy your own cloud on your own hardware.

Virtualization SIG

Updates from the recent SIG meeting include:

Xen 4.8 and 4.6 packages have been updated with latest XSAs

oVirt 4.2.3 has been released upstream, packages are being built for Virt SIG

qemu-kvm-ev has been rebased to 2.10 for CentOS 7.5

azure support: Microsoft joined Virt SIG willing to publish packages with additional Hyper-V/Azure support: two sets of packages - an existing kmod package (with userspace components too), and a newer kernel package that integrates those modules into a standard CentOS kernel.

Software Collections SIG

The portfolio of Software Collections has recently been expanded with several new additions:

HAProxy 1.8 (rh-haproxy18)

MongoDB 3.6 (rh-mongodb36)

Perl 5.26 (rh-perl526)

PostgreSQL 10.0 (rh-postgresql10)

Ruby 2.5 (rh-ruby25)

Varnish Cache 5 (rh-varnish5)

The additions, along with all the other collections, are available in the usual SCL-only repository, which can be enabled by installing the centos-release-scl package.

Events

CentOS participates in numerous events around the world.

Recent Events

CentOS had a presence at Red Hat Summit, where we were celebrating the recent release of 7.5.1804. You can see some photos from the event on Flickr.

Earlier this year, we had events at FOSDEM, in Brussels, and at FOSSAsia, in Singapore.

Upcoming Events

We have a number of events planned for the rest of this year, and we'd love to see you at an event near you.

Dojo at DevConf.US

On the day before DevConf.US, in Boston, we'll be hosting a one-day Dojo at Boston University. The event will be held on Thursday, August 16th, and further details are on the Dojo wiki.

CERN OpenStack/Ceph/CentOS day

We will be hosting another CentOS Dojo at CERN, on October 19th, 2018. Full details of the event are on the event website. The CFP is now open - we're looking for talks about what you're doing on CentOS, with an emphasis on HPC, cloud, and storage.

Planned Dojos

In addition to the above firm events, we're planning Dojos at Oak Ridge National Labs, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, and, once again, at FOSDEM. The ORNL date is yet to be decided, while the FOSDEM event is expected to occur on February 1st, 2019.

Other Events ...

Other events where we expect to have a presence include:

If you plan to represent CentOS at any event, from a Meetup to a Convention, do get in touch with Rich Bowen to see if we can help support you in any way.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

report on CentOS community activity

provide a report from the SIG on which you participate

maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter

write an article on an interesting person or topic

provide the hint, tip or trick of the month

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.