Help others on the mailing list, forums or IRC
We have a lot of users asking for good advice. If you are experienced and want to help the project, helping out on the mailing lists, the forums or on IRC is a good way to learn more yourself, and a good way to make new friends and feel good about helping others. Besides, it gives others time to contribute in other ways as well.
Help with hunting bugs and finding fixes
It is not uncommon that CentOS users find problems, have different expectations or simply are doing something wrong. We encourage our users to file bug-reports in our own bug tracking system, but this is not meant as a support system. So we need people helping to divert support questions to the mailing lists and forums, genuine issues need to be confirmed and hunted, and send upstream whenever possible.
It takes time, effort and skills to help tracking bugs, but it is a very rewarding thing to do. Testing packages are announced and discussed on the CentOS Developer’s list. Such packages are then available on the buildlogs nodes
Join the EPEL effort
EPEL - Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux - is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL).
Getting involved in EPEL is a great way to make CentOS more useful.
L10n
Translating parts of the CentOS project to different languages may be useful for non-English speaking users. The localization process (“L10n”, where the 10 is being a way of replacing the middle 10 letters of the word) contains many aspects, starting off with the translation of a specific component and leading into change tracking. This guarantees that translated content is always up to date.
If you are interested in taking part, you should first decide whether you want to translate wiki pages, anaconda slides or just assist on international fora or lists. Afterwards, please introduce yourself on the -docs ML and join up (possibly) existing translation teams. If necessary, you will be granted access to the specific resources.
Help with Artwork
If you think you’re good with graphics, do help out within our Artwork SIG.
Help with the CentOS newsletter
The monthly CentOS newsletter (aka. CentOS Pulse) reports about what happens in the CentOS community. We are looking for more people to contribute ideas and content for the newsletter. There is a special page about how to start contributing to the newsletter.
This is also a place where L10n is helpful, so that our newsletter may have a wider audience.
Join or start a CentOS Project
There are several projects about and focused on the core CentOS distribution that you can join and help with. There is no real signup requirements, and membership to the projects is open to everyone in the CentOS community. You can get a list along with a brief overview of the existing projects here.
You will also find details on how to go about starting a new project on the same page.
Help promote CentOS
We are actively looking for people to promote CentOS, either through positive experiences on a blog, or more direct through promotion on conferences. In both cases it is important to be honest about CentOS as a platform and to explain both advantages and disadvantages so that people understand what choices they have and remember for what reasons they did choose CentOS or something else.
##. Donating to the project
If you don’t have the time to help out with the project or you lack the necessary skills to contribute your time, feel free to donate to our cause. We don’t take monetary donations, but there are things we might need, like CDs, DVDs, T-Shirts or whatever. Just contact us.
CentOS Stream
CentOS Stream is a continuously delivered distribution which is upstream to the next minor version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For more information on the distribution itself, please read this wiki page.
For more information on contributing to CentOS Stream, see the CentOS Stream Contributor’s Guide.