Well, should we consider it a review.
The guy who wrote me recently: «Ah, I'd give up using computers if I were you, you obviously aren't enjoying the experience, either that or write an OS yourself that will suit just you.» should think twice about one of the reasons why Linux is not having a larger adoption in the enterprise environment: there are very few reliable distros that meet the enterprise requirements of stability, reliability, update policy, and the like.
I happened to read Is CentOS 5.0 Worth Every Penny? and this made me even grumpier. How smart have you to be to try a LiveCD under VMWare? Why is it live if not for being able to test it "for real", with direct contact with your real hardware?
Furthermore, just what is in the head of a guy who, while running under VMWare, complains that for Compiz... "The highest set of resolution I can have on my 19 inch screen monitor is only 800x600." Eh?
The unfair and dumb conclusion is only what would be the logical continuation: «So is CentOS 5.0 worth every penny? Not really. A live CD of its size should have been a little more complete. [...] If its main purpose is merely for testing or for rescuing a broken system, lots of Mini distributions can do the job just the same. CentOS 5.0 live CD edition shouldn’t have been released in the first place because it is not ready yet. For now, I wouldn’t recommend downloading it because it’s just a waste of time.»
Having a LiveCD "merely for testing or for rescuing a broken system" is very useful, and I remember I have used a CentOS 4.3 LiveCD more than once. Should our guy need an installable LiveCD, Urs Beyerle has done a great job by assembling the Scientific Linux Live CD 5.0, actually here.
Otherwise, you simply cannot assess the work of the CentOS team only based on the LiveCD under VMWare!
In times where I was a fervent GNOME aficionado, I was very satisfied with CentOS 4.x on my old laptop, because it was very stable. I remember however that in recent times I wasn't 100% happy with SL5 on my desktop because in the meantime my preferences have drifted towards KDE, and RHEL && clones are just "not quite for the KDE users". But RHEL is a solid enterprise-grade distro, and at least two of its clones are worth our respect: CentOS and SL (StartCom is a good one too; and I haven't tried yet X/OS).
CentOS has the advantage of being "the clone". Being the most popular of the rebuilds of RHEL, you have a very good chance to benefit enormously from their mailing lists. Also, if some blunder occurs upstream, you might find a workaround in the CentOS community even before the upstream comes with a fix!
Installing CentOS 5.0 right now has a slightly annoying downside: you'll have to pull tons of updates right away. Note that CentOS 5.0 issued "already obsoleted" media, for they understood the binary compatibility ad litteram: they have included the exact same versions of the packages as per the upstream RHEL 5.0 install media. It's just they released several months later, and updates were quite a lot...
CentOS also has some extra repos you might benefit of. However, they were much more consistent with version 4 than with version 5. Last but not least, Karanbir Singh does a great job with his extra packages too.
Scientific Linux became more interesting since 5.0. They released later than CentOS 5.0, but they include some extra packages even on the installation media!
They are therefore more lax when defining the binary compatibility. The released installation media are including updates that CentOS refused to have — of course many of them are already obsoleted right now, but anyway. Apart from a few original extra packages, SL also maintains on their FTP server a mirror of DAG, Dries and ATrpms packages for RHEL rebuilds.
SL had once some bug that broke KDE, but it's a minor thing. Just like CentOS, their mailing lists can be extremely useful at times, with a high Signal/Noise ratio :-), and they're a great community. Skipping the details, I remember how they identified a tzdata issue (and found a fix) before the upstream! In another occasion, when kpowersave failed to build, they helped me to build it by providing with a newer m4 than the upstream! (m4-1.4.8-1.src.rpm)
And yes, they have an installable LiveCD, so you can skip the 6-7 CDs (or the DVD) and also avoid the slowness of Anaconda!
What they lack badly is a better artwork... because both GDM and the default wallpaper are horrendous.
StartCom were the first to release a rebuild of RHEL5, which made me suspicious. Yes, I have used it for a while, for it came with a LXF.
What bugs me is their confusing range of products — the "MultiMedia Edition" flavors (MultiMedia Edition 5-ML-5.0.5 released in June 2006 and based on... God knows what "source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4", versus Enterprise Linux 5-AS-5.0.0 released in April 2007 and based on RHEL5). On the other hand, while not having the many extras/centosplus/etc. of CentOS, nor the "specific extras" and the Dag/Dries/ATrpms mirror of SL, they still have a few relevant extras (such as bmp, libdvdcss, libid3tag, vlc, wxGTK) — e.g. on my Belgian mirror.
But then, they only have forums, and no mailing lists. I am conservative, I prefer to have mailing lists.
Recently, X/OS Linux released its own 5.0, and the interesting part is that they included almost all the updates on the installation media! Very practical.
I have not tried it yet, but I can already see some downsides. #1: no mailing lists whatsoever. #2: are they providing with updates in a consistent manner? Not really.
For instance, the latest CentOS 5 updates are from October 3. With CentOS 5, you have updates up to and including RHN as of Oct. 2. The most recent updates include: gimp (RHSA-2007-0513), tomcat5 (RHSA-2007-0569), kernel-2.6.18-8.1.14 (RHSA-2007-0936), xen (RHSA-2007-0323), nfs-utils-lib (RHSA-2007-0951), gfs-kmod (RHBA-2007-0953).
With SL5, the most recent updates include the same gimp, tomcat5, kernel-2.6.18-8.1.14, xen, nfs-utils-lib. As I am writing this, the most recent one, gfs-kmod, is not ready yet, but they have a fixed elinks for SL 5 too — whereas CentOS has only packaged it for version 4.
They're on pair, actually.
As for StartCom, they lag behind with the updates: the most recent one dates from Sept. 18.
Unfortunately, X/OS is not much better either: there is no update newer than Sept. 21 (X/OS Linux 5.0 was released on Sept. 20).
So... what the heck... don't you feel that the only RHEL5 rebuilds that offer an enterprise-like quality of services are CentOS and Scientific Linux?
Too bad that X/OS came with updated installation media, but then with no updates for 2 weeks!
UPDATE: After the reply, someone thought of putting some more gas on fire.
Updates in RHEL5 clones, revisited.
9 commentsDefine 'prematurely'.
OK, I'll download and try it for myself.
OTOH, SL5 LiveCD is excellent.
The guy should know that the CentOS LiveCD is only a toy. The real OS is the *installed* system -- only that one is the "RHEL clone".
I was really disappointed to learn that CentOS Live CD did not have an installer. Everything worked just fine (though I did not test my printer).
I have since installed X/OS, and I like it, except for the printer issue. I am not sure when the RHEL 5.1 update will be released, but I hope my problems will be resolved by it. I find it stupid to change OS's when I am only having a problem with the printer, but this can be quite frustrating. I'll eventually give Mandriva 2008 a try, but I will really have to be awesome for me to install it, and keep upgrading every 18 months.
CentOS LiveCDs *never* had an installer. They always were for (1) testing/previewing before an installation; (2) rescuing a Linux box; (3) using Linux on someone else's Windows box :-)
Why did BULinux fail for you?
So why test it then if it cannot be installed at all. Check out the latest post from the site that reviewed CentOS. The guy made a response to this article.
>Why did BULinux fail for you?
Well, they originally had written their own update tool before Red Hat had Pirut/Pup. This was nice because you system would always be up to date. However, this update tool happens while your computer is booting, and this makes the boot process to be unbearably long. Not only that, there are only a subset of programs available via yum. If they don't have what you are looking for, then you just send them an email. They will start working on it, and then let you know when said package is in the repository. I liked the fact that they listened to my needs. However, they would not allow for Amarok to be available in the repository. They claimed licensing issues. The same thing with the Flash plug-in. Nevermind the fact that the BU website is dependent upon Flash. I teach second semester French at BU and there is lots of useful information on YouTube to show my students. Even the language lab uses Flash for all the videos in French. Yet, BU Linux takes this away from me based on some stupid rule. I don't know who the target audience is for BU Linux, but it is certainly not the average college (or graduate) student. Béranger, I know you might vomit a little in seeing this, but I tried gNewSense KDE version, and they even had Amarok. Also, to access certain information, you must be behind the BU firewall. You can download the specific VPNC programs from BU that are already setup to work with Windows and OSX. However, the only directions for BU Linux are for an old version. During the beta stage, I installed BU Linux and then asked the development team if they would install/setup the VPNC package to work with NetworkManager by default. They said no. BU Linux is a nice idea, but they don't do enough to make it useful for the average college student.
The LiveCD can be installed to local hard disk: run "livecd-install" or "livecd-install-gui".
See also http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/install.html
Comments are closed, complaints to info@.
I find the review fair as the guy is only talking about the Live CD and not the DVD version of CentOS. I have tried the live cd myself and it froze at boot on my P4, 512 MB computer. It sucks really and I thought they release it prematurely.