Last week RedHat released RHEL5.2 on the 21st, and probably most people running Centos 5 are wandering when they will get the updated Centos5.2 release as well. From past releases I have noticed that this takes a couple of weeks, close to a month, but didn’t really track the exact time lag between the releases.

Reading from Tim Verhoeven’s explanation:

“For some background information, why does it take 3,5 weeks ? First we need to remove all the logos and trademarks of Upstream. Secondly we need to build everything from source and this for both i386 and x86_64. Then everything that gets build goes past the QA team that verify that everything works as it should. From all the build packages install media will be created and these also need to be tested by the QA team. For each release a set of release notes are created and these are translated in different languages (12 for 5.1). Finally all the packages and media need to be uploaded in distributed to the mirror network so you can download it.”

we learn that we should expect Centos 5.2 released sometimes around June 14th 2008 (sooner or later).

Earlier this week, RedHat has announced the second minor update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: RHEL5.2. I was not able to update the rhel5 systems I manage until Friday, when this has become available in the update channels:
cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 enhancements are primarily focused in six areas:

• Virtualization
• Laptop and Desktop improvements
• Encryption and Security
• Cluster & Storage Enhancements
• Networking & IPv6 Enablement
• Serviceability

“Update brings broad refresh of hardware support and improved quality, combined with new features and enhancements in areas such as virtualization, desktop, networking, storage & clustering and security”

For full details check out the redhat press release.

Guardian Digital released yesterday, December 4, 2007 the latest version of their security targeted distribution: EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.18 (Version 3.0, Release 18). ISOs for i686 and x86_64 are available for direct download and also as torrent images. The download size is very small ~570 MB but it includes all the necessary tools to run a secure standalone or application server.

Changes in 3.0.18 include among others:

• New Guardian Digital Health Center for proactive hardware monitoring
• FwkNop and PSAD Tools for new levels of Security (featured in the the new Linux Firewalls book by Michael Rash)
• New stress-kernel package with a new stress testing suite
• Several new packages such as drbd (8.2.1), dsniff (2.3), psad (2.1), quota (3.15), sdparm (1.02), stress-kernel (3.0).
• The latest stable versions of MySQL (5.0.45), asterisk (1.4.14), kernel (2.6.23), openswan (2.4.10), samba (3.0.27a), syslog-ng (2.0.5), webtool (3.18), etc.
• Numerous fixes and features enhancements

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I have finally found a WordPress plugin that I liked, to implement a poll inside the sidebar of this blog. This is a great wordpress plugin called Democracy.

My first question for all the readers of the site is “What is your favorite Linux distribution?”. I would like to know that, in order to be able to focus some more on some distributions and less on others.

Head over to the sidebar to vote and feel free to expand on your answer in comments below.

I am sure that by now all the world has already found out and tested the cool new tool google launched yesterday: google trends… It is a very nice tool that allows you to see the searches done by peoples, on any keyword you are interested, have evolved over time. This doesn’t show ‘exact’ results, but instead is shows a nice graph with a visual representation of the ‘trend’. Another cool feature is that you get also some details about spikes on searches (on the right), and information about the locations of the peoples doing the searches (on the bottom of the page). You can also restrict the trend search by region or only some year or month in time. Very cool.

Still what I have liked most is the possibility to compare the trend of searches between 2 or more keywords. Let’s look for example on a comparison of the searches performed by peoples containing some linux distribution names. This doesn’t result in how many peoples are actually using linux, or those distributions, but the interest of the general public in those names. Here is a real example:

debian redhat fedora centos

What does this show us? That redhat is going down… (not a surprise after the release of their rhel/fedora projects). Debian is strong and many peoples are still interested into it. Fedora took the interest over redhat (rhel as search term is negligible). Centos? Peoples don’t know to much about this cool project.

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