CentOs

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 21:22 -0700, Victor Odhner wrote:
> 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.
----
you might consider (talking CentOS 4)...

enabling extras in /etc/yum.repos/CentOS-Base.repo

and also adding

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://archive.cs.uu.nl/mirror/dag.wieers/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://ftp2.lcpe.uni-sofia.bg/freshrpms/pub/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
#http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/freshrpms/pub/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://mirror.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/mirror/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://rh-mirror.linux.iastate.edu/pub/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://wftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/$ARCH/dag/

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo
# Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 4 - i386
# URL: http://rpmforge.net/
[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise 4 - i386 - RPMforge.net - dag
#baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/$basearch/dag/
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

or even easier...

rpm -ivh \
http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/redhat/el4/en/i386/RPMS.dries/rpmforge-release-0.2-2.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

rpm -ivh \
http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/i386/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-
release-0.2-2.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

and you would have a whole lot more packages at your fingertips
package listings...
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/
http://rpmforge.net/user/packages/

Craig