TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

CentOS, for those unfamiliar, is a clone distribution. The maintainers take the freely-available source code released by Redhat for its commercial Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product and recompile it, stripping out any trademarked artwork, then redistribute it as CentOS.

Because of this, CentOS is probably the closest equivalent to a free-of-charge RHEL that you can get. I recommend CentOS to anyone trying to learn more about RHEL, particularly for Redhat certification exams or corporate reasons.

Because it's based on the stable-by-design RHEL rather than Fedora, each version of CentOS focuses more on evolution than revolution. You won't see the eye-candy or new, largely untested gizmos that make Fedora popular.

The end result makes CentOS stable, but not particularly thrilling. I personally don't mind this (having used stable-but-not-exciting Ubuntu Hardy for several months now), but I thought it best to warn you ahead of time.

Install:

If you've installed Fedora in the last two years or so you know what to expect here. I chose the default install settings the first time to see what comes out of the box.

The install went off without a hitch and I was brought to a sparse login screen. I logged in and saw the default desktop. So far so good.

At this point I could have easily been looking at CentOS 4.2 if it weren't for the subtle "CentOS 5" in the bottom right corner. From a corporate IT perspective, I've been told that very little visual change is a good thing.

As usual, my first run-through was in a VM, which afforded me internet access. I was informed that there were updates available, so I applied them. Here is a complaint that I have with all Redhat/Fedora-based distributions: the update dialog gives you no information whatsoever.

I can't tell what updates are being downloaded, at what speed, from where, or even how far along I am except for the size of the progress bar. Just an estimate of how much time I have left would be significantly more useful. Surely I'm not the only person that this bothers.

As best I could tell, there was no ndiswrapper rpm on the DVD, which pretty much grounded CentOS on Rig 2. I was able to successfully install proper Nvidia drivers and Penny Arcade Adventures, however.

I suppose if I were really interested in using this distro I would find an Ndiswrapper RPM somewhere and pop it on (or buy an incredibly long ethernet cord to reach the nearest friendly router).

I find it necessary once again to mention that "Spatial Browsing" in Nautilus is worthless and should not be turned on by default. If people want it they can turn it on. I venture to say that most people don't.

Software Selection:

The GNU version of Java was present, but not GCC. MP3/WMV and Flash playback were also missing. I didn't expect those to be there.

Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP were present, but I could find no Pidgin. It was a strange omission, as I know quite a few professional organizations that use IM as part of their daily workflow. (Pidgin is available on the DVD, just not in the default install.)

There are a number of things available on the DVD for installation either through a customized first-install or as an add-on later.

The Achilles heel of this whole thing is that it relies on the Redhat Add/Remove program (pirut), which is much too internet-centric. If it chooses to work at all, it takes me about 5 minutes for pirut to realize it doesn't have an internet connection once I've launched it.

Depending on the phase of the moon (and the distribution I'm using) it will then sometimes shoot me an error about not being in sync with some repository XML file and summarily quit. Thankfully, unlike the version in Fedora, this one didn't quit on me.

I added on GCC and on a whim I checked the "Java Development" group as well. I hit the apply button. I waited. I waited some more. The "Resolving Dependencies" box whirled and whirled and whirled.

I knew what it was looking for. It was stuck looking for an internet connection. Rather than simply checking for connectivity and falling back on the DVD that was in the drive, it sat there like a broken record.

I realize that being disconnected from the internet is becoming a smaller and smaller problem these days. I realize that to say you don't have broadband in public carries the same stigma that kids with no home phone suffered when I was in kindergarten.

However, to design a key piece of your operating system to essentially lock up when it can't find a service that is still a luxury for a significant number of people is bad programming.

After about 10 minutes of letting pirut spin its wheels I canceled the operation. By that I mean I "pressed the cancel button, got no response, and eventually ended up having to Force Quit the entire application."

Let me just say that in all fairness, this is not a problem peculiar to CentOS. This problem plagues any distribution that uses pirut, including RHEL and Fedora. The persons responsible for the development of pirut seem to believe that broadband net access is a given, that it's somehow magically ubiquitous. I take issue with that.

I attempted to add the DVD on as a source but could find no equivalent to the "Software Sources" application I use daily in Ubuntu. I opened pirut again and looked in the menus for a repository option.

"Edit->Repositories" looked promising, but there was no obvious option to add the DVD. I checked "c5-media" thinking perhaps this would work. It didn't. I tried adding the DVD manually.

Not surprisingly, that method didn't work either. I searched around online and found a couple of suggestions. One relied on the ability to download another program called "createrepo," which I obviously couldn't do.

I tried the second method. I couldn't get it to work. Apparently I needed to do this manually for each individual package I wanted to install? Forget that.

Finally I decided to look at what was in the "c5-media" repository by editing it. Turns out, the URL to the DVD was wrong! See my before and after pictures for what was changed. It's subtle, but significant.

Once I changed that, pirut quit balking at me. I installed the Development and Java Development groups of software without incident. A note to Redhat developers: please fix the default repository settings for the DVD media.

Conclusion:

Despite my issues with the DVD, once I figured out how to add it there was a good amount of software available to round out the installation. The lack of multimedia codecs is an annoyance, but not something I see getting addressed any time soon.

If I were in the mood to use an RPM-based distribution, CentOS would be my first and probably only choice. It's not as pretty as openSuSE or even its cousin Fedora, but it's more stable than both on my setup. Stability wins out over eye-candy any day.

CentOS is one of the few distributions that (perhaps due to its emphasis on small, incremental changes) manages to pull consistently high marks even from me. This release is no exception.