* they could not insert an USB stick (gnome went crazy)
* and ONE X app (home made) crashed everything under certain rare circumstances (but it did the same thing on Mandriva, and every virtual GNU-Linux I had).
That would be a very booring review (unstable sexy things are more funny)…

With CentOS 5.2 I have at work, I could get everything I needed (even more), "only" grass had to be configured/made compiled (but not its dependencies) ; ntfs was not recognised (one could use ntfs-utils -hope it is its name-, but there was a discrepancy between the manual and the executables, as ntfs-mount was missing). I noticed, too, that sqlite3 had obsolete routines (sqlite3_prepare_v2 was missing, there was only sqlite3_prepare….) but sqlite3 is very easy to recompile in a separate place/directory….

Maxima could not work (very strange consumption of CPU) but is is very common (a weird dependancy : anyway, most of the people prefer to use some paper and pencils to simplify / verify equations ; perhaps it works only under wine)…

I cannot test it for sound, as I am deaf and as computers at work have no loudpeakers (my colleagues are not deaf!!!)

Then I have used for *shorter* periods of time:
– Scientific Linux 5.0 (since Beta-2) and 5.1
– X/OS 5.0
– StartCom Linux AS 5.0.0 and 5.0.1
– CentOS 5.1

Oh, and… if NHL stands for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma… I hope you get well!

Anytime I want to "play", lots of tosh out there to fiddle with.
Miss some of the acid: more coffee: get restless…
Thanks for the pages, been great reading over the years.

I am curious: what makes the .deb such an unacceptable concept for you?

Reason #1: One can't use the *extra* packages that are SPECIFIC to CentOS or to ScientificLinux on any of the other distros, because they *require* the SPECIFIC centos-release or startcom-release package.

Therefore, I decided that I only want from a RHEL clone only the packages provided by upstream; everything else should rather come from RPMforge etc.

This makes the initial choice for ScientificLinux non-mandatory.

Reason #2: ScientificLinux is interesting for people who have Intel wireless (not me!), people who need specific sicentific software (not me!), or people who want to use IceWM out of the box (from the miniLiveCD).

I don't know what I'll do with the old HP laptop, maybe it'll run SL, but for the newer laptop I definitely want GNOME, so SL is not required.

Besides that, installations from the LiveCDs are highly non-standard, with autologin, etc. And the use of the XFS is incomplete: XFS can't be used in Anaconda, which for the lazy me it means it can't be used. It's possible to install while only using XFS partitions from the LiveCDs, however the 5.3 LiveCDs have a big not present in the 5.2 LiveCDs: GRUB can't install correctly when using XFS. I don't like this kind of regressions, so I can't rely on SL for a non-ext3 support.

This makes the choice for ScientificLinux non-mandatory.

OK, the SL people are MUCH nicer than the CentOS guys. Still, I don't have to like the people. What I need is a EL clone. To hell with the people.

Reason #3: StartCom Linux AS seems to have some problem with the updates. All the mirros I've tried only seem to have updates up to February. Hopefully StartCom won't die like X/OS died!

This makes the choice for StartCom Linux AS unsuitable.

Reason #4: The initial impression and the defaults are important to me. I don't want to search for better wallpapers, to reskin the GDM, etc. etc. And ScientificLinux looks HORRENDOUSLY when comes to the artwork.

Fortunately, CentOS has been always better with the artwork, and 5.3 is even more professional-looking.

This makes the choice for CentOS a nice idea.

Reason #5: I am tired with "niche" distros. I can't trust them anymore. The choice would be something "mainstream" — the same way I switched to WordPress for the blogging engine. I am now favoring the STANDARDS.

OK, Ubuntu failed, Fedora is equally buggy (if not buggier) and supported for shorter periods, Debian makes no sense to me for various reasons, openSUSE 11.1 is bloated and too complex as a general design (yet still a valid choice for other people), Mandriva is in the same bugginess categroy with Fedora and Ubuntu (plus, I hate RPMdrake and I am not very familiar with urmpi & friends), Slackware lacks GNOME and it doesn't even care to configure my Touchpad (for scrolling long pages while reading them, I ALWAYS use the Touchpad!)… what's left?

A RHEL5 clone named CentOS. That's right, CentOS is a "de facto standard".

And this is how I went into CentOS 5.3.

Of course, I have been using CentOS 4.3 and 4.4 in the past, and it was not a bad OS for those times. CentOS 5 is even better, so… why not?

So of all the three leading RHEL5 clones (CentOS, Scientific, Startcom), why do you pick CentOS?
According to your previous posts, I get the impression that CentOS is not the leader, repo-wise nor package-update-wise.

It's wrong as an approach, and unsafe by design.

As a general principle, *nobody* should use 3rd-party "helper tools" that are doing things you don't exactly know about! ANY PROGRAMMING ERROR COULD MAKE YOUR SYSTEM UNUSABLE AND UNRECOVERABLE!

You only have to make the compromise of trusting 3rd-party "trustworthy" repos when this is the only convenient way to retrieve a package. Even when you're doing that, you can choose piece-by-piece what you install, and yum even asks you with a summary before proceeding. Note that normally a bad RPM can't screw *everything*, as file conflicts normally make the transaction fail. (A bad DEB can usually screw much more AFAIK.)

I personally don't hope Fedora will stop treating the users as guinea pigs. This is exactly what prevents me using it, and here we are back to Day Zero — the day when Red Hat was split between EL and Fedora Core.

Or maybe the wrong decision is not to release twice a year, but to incorporate so many changes within the 6-mo time span! They could very well release "patched" distros twice a year, more like the way EL releases "dot" updates, with only the applications incremented, but not the base system. The base system could change less often, and less radically. Everyone can see the havoc created by X.Org, right?

I can see no common sense in the Linux distros world: most distros are releasing too often and too buggy; some distros can't be trusted on when they update or patch things; and the Enterprise-grade distros are too conservative.

Yes, I second your opinion about the announcement. It's too childish and out of place. I wonder what was going on with this F11 release. Too much stress endured resulting in some kind of delusional effect? Break the short-cycle policy then.

And yes, as a Fedora fan (I can't resist the look), I genuinely hope they quit 6-month release cycle and stop being such a guinea pig. If they want to be experimental, just do alphas and betas, those greek alphabets are there for a reason (well, not too mention RC as well).

Paul W. Frields' announcement looks like he was in too high spirits. I didn't like the "Dr. Brattlesworth" thing. Boy, was this the announcement for a stupid video game or for a serious OS?

And no, they can't quit the 13-month policy because they can't support releases that feature different technologies in different stages of development. They have to just release the latest-and-greatest collection of bugs.

They could only quit the 13-month policy iff they quit the 6-month release cycle.

As today, I just installed F11 and arrived at the conclusion that I got more lovin' feelin' from F10.

Well thanks to autoten from Dangermouse, the task from getting most commercial/restricted packages are much more easily done.

:o)

No, the whole review idea doesn't sound bad… Sometimes it takes a new eye for a different review… A desktop user, having to deal with today's issue…

Installing today's apps…

Anyway, it was just a thought…

Scary. I remove at compile stage the kernel mode setting feature for my Intel based laptops and I use old style xorg.conf….and it works fine. But after what has happened over the last year it's not unreasonable to envisage a distribution like Ubuntu knowingly releasing with kernel mode setting enforced (no option) *and* broken drivers. To their credit Fedora have the developer resources to work on this stuff in house and make progress and probably get it to all come together but derivative distros like Ubuntu don't, and what's more they have proven themselves overly eager to release the latest <whatever> to grab the headlines, even if it is bad for the end user.

On my side, Jaunty is still working like a acharm, but I am very keen on CentOS 5.3…

I might organize a dual-boot….

-How about some sort of a CentOS review ???