TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

CentOS has impressed me in the past by its simplicity and stability. It's a clone of Redhat's Enterprise OS so you expect a certain level of quality from it. Releases don't differ as wildly in their look or feature selection as its more bleeding-edge cousin Fedora, and that's just fine for someone like me. The things that make it into RHEL have been well-tested. We shall see if this release lives up to its predecessors.

Install:

As one would expect from a product meant for business, changes in each release are small and subtle. The installer for CentOS 4.3 seems functionally and visually identical to previous releases, but since Redhat's Anaconda installer is pretty good overall, this didn't bother me. For brevity's sake I decided on first install to choose the "Personal Desktop" option and just let it install whatever it wanted.

Upon first boot I was greeted with the same gaudy light blue GRUB bootloader screen as the previous 2 CentOS releases. I really wish they'd just go with a plain black or something, but that's a little gripe. The usual Redhat firstboot program ran and got my regular user, root password, X configuration and sound set up. All worked as advertised. I was then greeted with the usual CentOS logon screen and dumped to a Gnome desktop. Again, this is all pretty standard stuff, so if you want a more detailed description, read my review of CentOS 4.1.

My USB thumbdrive mounted and unmounted as expected while I was a regular user. Since I didn't specify development tools in the installer I had to add them on using Add/Remove Packages. I was pleased to see that unlike Fedora, the Add/Remove Packages program for CentOS 4.3 actually *works*. Once all that was done I was able to successfully install the latest commercial Nvidia drivers.

As expected, multimedia support out of the box was basically non-existent. MPG movie and MP3 audio playback were not installed. A quick install of Xine and XMMS from my file archive fixed it, but nonetheless there are other distributions out there that offer this out of the box. I had to install Sun's Java SDK as well. These aren't suprising, since Redhat tries to keep as much proprietary and/or contraversial stuff out of their OS as possible, but you'd think a company as well-off as Redhat could pony up and pay for an MP3 decoder license or a DVD codec.

Software Selection:

The usual Gnome setup is included. KDE is installable off the DVD, and as usual it's a pretty default configuration out of the box. Since Redhat focuses on Gnome, CentOS does too. Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim and the usual other programs are present, though in decidedly old versions. OpenOffice is 1.1.2, Firefox is 1.0.7. I couldn't tell what version Gaim was but it goes to reason it's older as well. This is unfortunate but expected. The corporate world wants stable, not new.

Most Annoying Feature:

The single annoying feature that popped up in CentOS 4.2 for me was a little one. The wait cursor would come up at random times and never go away, so I was stuck using a spinning blue ring for my pointer. Thankfully this bug was fixed in 4.3, which leaves me with only one serious issue: multimedia. This isn't an issue confined to CentOS; every Redhat-based distribution seems to want to err on the cautious side and not include what most desktop computer users consider very basic functionality such as the ability to play media files. Perhaps this doesn't matter in a corporate world, but it does to me.

How much does it matter, you say? Well as much as I hate to do this, I can't in good conscience give CentOS a perfect score when other distros get the multimedia thing right. They may not get anything *else* right, but they do let me play MP3s and MPG video out of the box. That's a reluctant half penguin deduction.

Who's it best for?

I'm happy to say that CentOS is the first decent, stable and (relatively) full-featured distribution I've reviewed this year, and it certainly throws the gauntlet down for SuSE 10.1 when it comes out. I could easily use CentOS as a daily system for work, play (once I install the codecs) and just everyday useful things. I would also not mind recommending it to less Linux-savvy users as a stable desktop experience. Good job, CentOS, and a special thanks to truoc444 for sending me this distro. It earns a place in my CD case for future installs.