Dear CentOS enthusiast,

After a slowdown over the past few months, the year is off to a busy start. I'm getting the newsletter out a little later than usual, due to having spent last week in Brussels, at FOSDEM. More about this below.

Special thanks go to Aman Gupta, who stepped up to help with the newsletter this month. If you are interested in helping us write the monthly newsletter, please do get in touch. And see the section below on other ways you can contribute to the CentOS community.

IN THIS EDITION:

News

Those of you who are following CentOS Stream progress will have noticed that updates are starting to flow. dnf update to get those updates, which are a preview of the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We continue to work on the tooling, as discussed in this email thread, and others on the CentOS-devel mailing list.

Please also see the thread about the choice of git forge solution which will be run by the Red Hat CPE team on behalf of the CentOS community. Your input is valuable in that decision.

The January Board meeting agenda has been posted to the blog: https://blog.centos.org/2020/01/agenda-for-centos-board-of-directors-2020-01-08-meeting/

We've had a number of blog posts in recent days that you'll want to be sure to read:

Releases and updates

On January 19th, CentOS Linux 8.1.1911 was released. You can read the release notes here. Also, have a look at the longer-term roadmap for this, and our other CentOS releases.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

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

Errata and Security Advisories

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

Tue Jan 14 2020: CESA-2020:0086 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035597.html

Wed Jan 15 2020: CESA-2020:0085 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035600.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0123 Important CentOS 6 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035601.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0120 Important CentOS 7 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035602.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0124 Important CentOS 6 git Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035603.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0122 Important CentOS 6 java-11-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035604.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0122 Important CentOS 7 java-11-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035605.html

Sat Jan 18 2020: CESA-2020:0124 Important CentOS 7 git Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035606.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0157 Important CentOS 6 java-1.8.0-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035607.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0199 Critical CentOS 6 openslp Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035608.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0197 Important CentOS 6 python-reportlab Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035609.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0262 Important CentOS 7 openjpeg2 Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035613.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0195 Important CentOS 7 python-reportlab Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035614.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0203 Important CentOS 7 libarchive Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035615.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0227 Important CentOS 7 sqlite Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035616.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0196 Important CentOS 7 java-1.8.0-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035617.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CESA-2020:0194 Important CentOS 7 apache-commons-beanutils Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035618.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

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

Tue Jan 28 2020: CEBA-2020:0255 CentOS 6 poppler BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035610.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CEBA-2020:0257 CentOS 6 libreswan BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035611.html

Tue Jan 28 2020: CEBA-2020:0256 CentOS 6 kernel BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035612.html

Other releases

The following releases also happened during January:

Wed Jan 15 2020: Release for CentOS 8 (1911) on armhfp - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035598.html

Wed Jan 15 2020: Release for CentOS Linux 8 (1911) - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-January/035599.html

Events

DevConf.cz, CentOS Dojo, and FOSDEM

The last few weeks have been very busy ones. We had representation at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic, and at FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium, as we do most years. DevConf is an event by developers, for developers, and so there's always a big turnout of CentOS fans there. We had a standing-room-only presentation about CentOS Stream, and the video of that session (as well as all of the others) will be available in the next week or two. Watch our Twitter for that video.

In Brussels, we also ran a one day CentOS Dojo, as we have every year for a decade. We had about 110 in attendance, and some great content. We're starting to publish the video on YouTube, and the talk slides are all published to the event page. There's also a full detailed event report on the blog.

Upcoming events

We have a very full schedule of events coming up for the year, which you can always seen listed on the Events page in the wiki.

March 19-21, FOSSAsia Summit, Singapore

April 24th, CentOS Dojo at Facebook, Menlo Park (San Francisco) California - still working on details!

September, CentOS Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee (Details still being worked out)

October 23rd, CentOS Dojo at CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland.

Follow us on Twitter for announcements as these events shape up over the coming weeks.

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 CentOS Promo SIG has published their quarterly report on the blog.

The AltArch SIG has published new notes about CentOS 8.

The Cloud SIG and the Software Collections SIG, held SIG update sessions at the recent CentOS Dojo in Brussels. Their slides are on the event page, and the video will be posted shortly.

Contributing

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

You could spend months, or even years, planning a first contribution to a code base. Or you could start small, work your way up, and make that awesome contribution today. As with any open source project, there's a lot more than just code.

If you aren't well versed in programming, then start with the documentation. Why? Well, it is a great way to get a feel for the process, and all projects need better documentation. Pick a part of the project that you use, and look at the documentation to see if there's a way that you can improve it.

It’s less about the actual value you added to the project, and more about entering the OSS community and contributing whatever you can to help the community, If you’re a maintainer, help a newcomer make their first PR! Or help them to work on the documentation.

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. Indeed, right now there's an ongoing project to update the CentOS logo and visual identity.

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 interests 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.

The community needs dedicated people who are willing to help the community grow. Start contributing today!