I haven’t written anything during the past two months and I could easily blame it on the work I’ve been doing but the truth is that I’ve been lazy. During this time there has been a few releases that I should be tracking (as a matter of fact I am on production server but not on this blog) so let’s see what has popped out of the box:

13th of September: The 7th update from CentOS (5.7) – http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.7

1-3rd of November: oVirt is released following the workshops and the official release is scheduled for the 31st January 2012

8th of November: Fedora 16 is released – http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_Notes/

6th of December: Red Hat releases the second update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (6.2)

9th of December: CentOS releases the first long awaited update to CentOS 6 (6.1) – http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.1

16th of December: Red Hat announces the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 Beta

What’s missing?

Spacewalk seems to have missed the roadmap release (Wiki is experiencing some issues so I can’t confirm the dates)

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Beta 3 is now available for download and this definitely worth a try if you have used the previous version with Windows components. It includes rewritten components in Java and major improvements to the Spice protocol.

CentOS 6.2: Yes you’ve read properly CentOS 6.2 is currently 99% complete and in QA so expect the release to happen within a few days. If you’re wondering how come the release is tailing CentOS 6.1 which just got released or why 6.0 and 6.1 took such a long time to come out read What happened to 6.1

You must have also noted that I haven’t got any posts on setting up a perfect desktop under Fedora 15 or Fedora 16 and the reason is the shift to the Gnome 3 desktop. I won’t rant too much about Gnome 3 as there are enough posts complaining about how Gnome developers think that the average Joe is an idiot and needs a completely new desktop interface to work. I’ve never felt so unproductive with a Gnome desktop, while the shell extensions and tweak tool makes life a bit easier I still can’t work properly but I have set-up Fedora 16 on a separate laptop  to give it another chance.

One nice tool you may want to look at if you wish to simplify the set-up of a desktop under Fedora 16 is Fedora Utils. As the project mentions you can easily install codecs and additional software, fix problems, tweak and clean up your system, view system information and much more with just few clicks.

Update

1) As of today (21st of December) CentOS 6.2 has been released – http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.2 . As usual the best place to start when looking for help with CentOS is at the wiki ( http://wiki.centos.org/GettingHelp ) which lists various options and communities who might be able to help. If you think there is a bug in the system, do report it at http://bugs.centos.org – but keep in mind that the bugs system is *not* a support mechanism.

A big thank you to the CentOS team who contributed towards making 6.2, specially the enormous effort put in by everyone on the QA team – right on the heels of the 6.1 release. And the excellent work being done on the test-automation.

Downloading CentOS-6.2 for new installs:

When possible, consider using torrents to run the downloads. In most cases you will find its also the fastest means to download the distro. There are currently over a thousand  people seeding CentOS-6 and it’s possible to get upto 400mbps downloads via these torrents.

Torrent files for the DVD’s are available at :
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.2/isos/i386/CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD1to2.torrent
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.2/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.2-x86_64-bin-DVD1to2.torrent

2) As of today, the 22nd of December Spacewalk 1.6 has been released with IPv6 Server/client support, Fedora 16 server/client and much more. You can read the release notes at https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/ReleaseNotes16