Those who are not actively monitoring the Wiki or project lists may be interested to hear that CentOS now more fornally hosts several subprojects with their own Subversion trees and ticket tracking. A list of projects is available on the Wiki. Currently there are four projects, which all potentially add a lot of value to CentOS:

  • The CentOS Live CD project will be creating live CDs of the CentOS system, starting with CentOS 5.1. The project is driven by Patrice Guay, who also created the CentOS 5.0 Live CD, and who has renewed the live CD infrastructure to use the Fedora livecd-tools.
  • Project Cranberry is working on a sysadmin toolkit, which will contain a specific set of packages aimed at system maintenance and recovery.
  • Dasha is a project that aims to bring more drivers to CentOS, which can either be drivers that were disabled in the upstream kernel, drivers backported from newer kernels, and third party drivers. Since CentOS aims at stability rather than being cutting edge, this project is a welcome addition for newer hardware.
  • Pandora is a project that works on a comfortable package browser for the CentOS repositories, that also aims to provide RSS feeds and future integration with the CentOS bugtracker.

Of course, we are always on the look-out for new contributors to the CentOS project and community, and working on CentOS projects is one of the possible ways to contribute. You can help projects by:

  • Testing code and packages produced by the projects, and submitting bug reports for problems that you encounter at the project's Trac site.
  • Contributing code to particular projects that you are interested in.
  • Proposing a new project and driving it, if it is accepted as a CentOS-hosted project.