CentOS is not your everyday Linux. It's a server distribution, meant to be used in production environment where users do not care about what applications they have installed. It's a distro that you will most likely run without any GUI, reboot once every other year or so, if that, and upgrade only when you really must, since the inclusion of even simplest binaries could be dreadfully risky for your setup.

CentOS is a distribution that deals in long-term stability and security. Branched off as a free version of the vastly popular RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS is everything the most important server distribution is, except the expensive, official support from the vendor. Speaking of support, CentOS 5.x versions, which are all based on RHEL5.x versions, are going to be supported until 2014, a total of seven years since the major release launch in 2007.

CentOS for serious linux users

But when I left for a few minutes yesterday to go use the toilet and returned to find my own 2 year old daughter playing it up on a Centos test machine -- I woke up.

Full Stoy

The Linux Foundation 2007 Desktop Linux Survey results summarizes responses from more than 20,000 desktop users. CentOS finishes as the number 6 Business Desktop and the number 8 Personal Desktop in the survey.

The CentOS Project is pleased with the CentOS adoption numbers on the Desktop, including our finish above the following Enterprise distributions in the Business Desktop category: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), and Mandriva. CentOS also finished ahead of these other notable distributions in the Business Desktop category: Xandros, Gentoo, Slackware, MEPIS, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS, Linspire, Freespire, Sabayon, and Mint.

In the Personal Desktop category, CentOS finished above the paid Enterprise distributions Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), though CentOS did drop below Gentoo, Mandriva and Knoppix in this category.

Clearly the Ubuntu family is the big winner in this survey, with Red Hat also showing they are a major player on the Linux desktop as well.

Overall, we are very happy with the CentOS placement in this survey since we were not even listed in the previous 2 desktop surveys by the Linux Foundation. A big thank you to CentOS users ... lets see if we can't move into the top 5 in both categories next year .

Here are some other stories about this survey:
Desktop Linux on the rise, Linux Foundation reports

Survey says ... Linux desktop is ever more popular

Desktop Linux - still about freedom

SpiderTools.com now offers two 40 hour classes for Centos 5, live online training. This is a completely interactive classroom where students may see the instructor's screen and hear the instructor. They may interact with the instructor using voice or text chat. The class is based on CentOS 5.

Class Structure:
The instructor will explain a concept, demonstrate the concept, allow student interaction and then provide a lab for students to complete the project on their servers.

Each student will be provided a VMWare Linux Server that they may use for labs to create an actual live server to manage.

No travel necessary...access class from the convenience of your own home!

SpiderTools.com

CentOS and Layered Technologies (LT) invite all hosting industry players to LT PACT 2007:::LAS VEGAS.

This 2nd annual event will be in Las Vegas, Nevada from June 20th to June 22nd. Hosting customers, techies, resellers, vendors, media and industry players will converge on Caesars Palace once again for the event that will take everyone to the next level.

Come early to Las Vegas and stay late!

The seventh Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM 2007) will take place the 24th and 25th February 2007. FOSDEM is organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. This year's meeting is taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium). FOSDEM meetings are recognized as "The best Free and Open Source events in Europe."

The CentOS project will be represented at FOSDEM by four of our Core Development members (Lance Davis, Karanbir Singh, Ralph Angenendt, and Dag Wieers) as well as by several other key members of the CentOS Community.

CentOS recently finished in the top 3 Linux distributions in the 2006 UK Linux & Open Source Awards.

The CentOS Project wants to again thank our loyal user base for our unbelievable showing in another big name contest.

Our top 3 showing (finishing behind Ubuntu) at the Awards Banquet follows our #2 finish (also behind Ubuntu) at the 2005 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards.

The CentOS community is truly awesome, let's see if we can work together to make this distro even bigger and better in the future.

OR ... why every city council needs at least one geek

Background: This a default test page that shows up after an install of CentOS. It is slightly different between the 3 centos versions ... here is an example:

http://mirror.centos.org/mirrorscripts/noindex_new.html

Now, the rest of this story is true ... hard to believe, but true none the less. I will just post the raw e-mails (email addresses removed) and let you see a day in the life of the CentOS Team

We want to make it clear that the CentOS team does not support sending derogatory e-mails to anyone. Thank you for your understanding.

Centos now has its own Folding at Home team! If you would like to learn more about what we do, please follow this link to the Folding at Home homepage.

New to distributed computing?, its not a problem. Here is the simplest description: Many computers working on separate pieces of the same puzzle are faster than a few computers working on many pieces of the puzzle. By "distributing" the work load to as many computers as possible, results are faster and accumulate faster. This provides more information to the people who can use it, thus letting them actually work with the results instead of working to get results. Hopefully the above summary doesn't leave you lost and confused. If you are still with us then great, but if you're feeling lost? You can search google for distributed computing for more in depth information.

Now on to Centos folders and Folding at Home. We are a team of members with various computer setups and knowledge. Our primary operating system of choice is Centos and our favourite distributed computing program is Folding at Home. You can see our team stats by clicking here, this should be updated regularly. Would you like to join the team? Well, if so it is as simple as visiting the Folding@Home website and downloading the version you prefer. Once you've got it please read this FAQ written by Jtang613. Please note, our team number is 48721. There now, its just as easy as that and now you are a part of the team. Welcome to the Fold! :) Further information about various installers and monitors can be found here. My personal preference is to use finstall to install and a superkaramba theme to help monitor the work unit.

[Editor's note: Written by Sharon ... If you are interested in doing Folding@Home, why not do it on the CentOS team.]

Request Tracker (RT), is an enterprise-grade issue tracking system. It allows organizations to keep track of their to-do lists, who is working on which tasks, what's already been done, and when tasks were completed.

It was packaged for CentOS 4 and it's available at:
http://campus.fct.unl.pt/paulomatos/rt/repository/3.4.x/.

If you like it, just get repository file rt-3.4.x.repo and copy it to /etc/yum.repos.d/ and install.

You can get more information at the wiki page.