CentOs

[Victor Odhner]

Micah DesJardins wrote:
 >  Has anybody had an experiences with either White Box or Cent OS?

CentOs just plugged and played for me several months ago, and I am not 
looking back.

I was not pleased with Gnome -- ran into one show-stopper problem -- so 
I work strictly in KDE, which again Simply Works.

This is my home machine.  My main computing uses at home are email and 
web browsing, and I haven't figured out Open Office yet since I'm 
committed to Word 97 for the two documents that I maintain.  My real 
work is at the application level, on Solaris and a little bit of RHEL, 
but I do that at the office via an XP desktop.

I installed CentOs some months ago at home, and it is my primary 
desktop, multi-booted with XP Pro (used about twice a month), 
SystemRescueCD on HD (it helped me to set up my stuff and my Boot 
Manager lives in that environment, but I rarely go there; nice basic 
backup system if I need it), and another distro or two that I'm trying 
at any given time.  So when I tunnel into my XP machine at work, it's 
CentOS/KDE  > Cisco VPN > XP Pro > Exceed X server > Solaris/RHEL.

Previous to CentOs I had RedHat 8.0, and other attempts going back five 
years or more, but none of them saw all my hardware and updates all 
failed on dependencies.  I chose CentOs over Fedora because my objective 
was not experimentation or cutting edge, but a real, stable, 
businesslike environment.  I chose to have a RHEL clone because my 
employer (Pegasus Solutions) uses RHEL for all production Linux boxes so 
I'd just as soon be in the same groove.

Updates just work.  Downloads of non-CentOs packages seem to work well 
too.  I had to go looking for the NTFS module so I could see my C 
drive.  I had to install the Cisco VPN client.  I had a little trouble 
when I downloaded Firefox directly from Mozilla instead of via CentOs, 
but 1.5b1 installed really nice, no problem at all.

I am experimenting with various other distros, mainly Mepis-based at the 
moment, one of which has turned into a fairly rich Debian environment; 
but I do all my routine home computing under CentOs except for the rare 
moments when I visit XP.

Vic