bjoernvold.com

I thought that I would have a look at the free RedHat so I downloaded Centos 6.5.

Centos 6.5 is the same as RedHat 6.5.

To save space I picked the minimum install CD without a gui. but with a graphical installer:

Nice installer that works well if you know where you are and what language you speak.
You get to set the root password and the installer comes with a lot of options for partitioning. All fairly straight forward and nicely presented.
So time to reboot then...
And after that GUI install I am now at the CLI login....

Good berserks have no problem with that because we can only install a DE later. BUT there was this slight problem:
I could not get a network. Ok I thought I should try to edit /etc/resolv.conf with nano - but nano was not installed...
So I had to refresh my rusty vi knowledge.
I managed to edit the file but that did not help so I went to edit the network scripts ...with vi.

and there I found

and changed it to:


Then I added myself as a user:

and gave myself a password:

I also edited the sudoers file and gave myself superduper rights

Then I re-booted......

Oh wonder I finaly had the network so I installed nano and updated Centos:

and

I have said before during Fedora tests, that yum has the same logic as I have - so yum understands me
Time to see if I can get a DE up and running then...

Gnome is the default desktop in Centos.. so I picked Xfce4
Xfce is lighter than Gnome which makes total sense on a server.

To make that happen I need to install wget:


The Redhat Family is big and they can borrow from each other so we need to borrow epel from Fedora:

Epel stands for: Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, and we need to add it in the standard rpm manner:


So those were the preparations needed according to my studies.

Time to install Xfce4 then:

Centos has a lot of meta packages or groups that can be installed with yum groupinstall.
They can be listed with yum grouplist

So that should be it!
Time to start xfce4

and....


Eh not exactly what I expected that.
When Centos provides a minimal install; they are not kidding. It seems I am completely lacking fonts.

According to my quirky logic's that could be done with

and...

That's more like it.
I told you that yum understands me.
I now have Centos 6.5 installed with Xfce4.

Since I set up Centos in a Virtualbox I am tired of looking at that tiny little window but the CDrom with VB Guest additions do not auto-mount - so it is time for a little somersault to make it work:

Then we need to make the directory to mount the Virtualbox CDrom (That is chosen under Storage in the VB-manager)

Finally we mount it:


Yes it is that easy (almost)
We need to install a lot of stuff to make it work:
I installed dkms first:

then I installed the load of other needed stuff:

Piece of cake
Now we have to run the script on the cdrom
cd /media/cdrom/

Time to reboot then....


Oh yes -that's more like it!

Now I can drag my Centos as big as I want it, and copy and paste between the WM and my desktop ..and.. you know; all that other stuff that you can do with Virtualbox.
By now this thing is totally usable.

So since this is the Rolls Royce of servers naturally I had to install a Lamp server with Phpmyadmin.


And finally I set up Webmin as the server control panel.
To achieve that I had to go to the opt directory where it is customary to install third party stuff

And downloaded Webmin


Then I installed it;

Then I went to my browser and entered the panel like this:
http://localhost:10000
Webmin lets you control pretty much everything on your *nix in a user friendly way - like Grub, partitioning ,RAID, the servers, and Firewall+++. It is a good tool for servers.



So here I am then with an Apache server, PHP, Mysql, phpmyadmin and the webmin control panel.
I guess that is where Centos is put to it's best use - but it will serve perfectly fine as a desktop too.

Just don't expect cutting edge software - expect stability
Here is an excuse for a video:



Here are some data about my Install:

Ok I have been using it for a while now and I did install the yum GUI called yum extender


It is fairly fast and keeps nicely track of the repos.

I can access the server I installed in Virtualbox from the network and ssh into my VB Centos install. the Xfce4 DE works well.


This thing is growing on me - so I kind of like it now. Video coming up......

I think that if Mageia ever implodes (always a possibility with a community distro, heavily dependent on a handful of volunteers) I would use CentOS. I did try v5.x a while ago and, since it is a clone of Red Hat, I found that the learning curve was not too steep. Thanks to the Fedora community there are plenty of user guides for getting the nonfree stuff that Red Hat does not provide.

Of course CentOS is itself a community distro desperately in need of more volunteers. There is never a "perfect" solution when selecting a linux distro.

Jim

True.
You would prefer Centos over Fedora?

viking60 wrote:You would prefer Centos over Fedora?

Fedora's a bit too bleeding edge for my liking. A few years ago I would have chosen it, but the older I get the slower I get in adapting to change.

Jim

Yes having an OS that does the stuff day in and day out without having to fiddle with it is what every business wants too.
Stability is often the opposite of change.

Once it is up and running - if you can get there - then Centos is supposed to be excellent - I don't know yet: I will have to leave it up for a long time to check it out.

Fedora has a tendency to break anything that works - and IMO Arch is stabler (and more bleeding edge). Fedora is to much of a guinea-pig to make a sensible desktop (I am grateful for their work though).

...And "old" is just a state of mind (you can do something about that); there are two objective criteria s here that we cannot get past - alive and dead.

We are working on it - and we are pretty good at doing something about alive - but that other one is tricky.
There is not even a service in systemd for it...

Anyway Mageia is still alive and delivering surprisingly good quality - distro wise - if you stick to KDE at least.

But Mageia is rather conservative too, so the difference should not be all to big with a change to Centos.

Video as promised:

viking60 wrote:and gave myself a password:

Code: Select all

passwd viking

I don't know if this was supposed to give me a chuckle, but it did. :-)

S.

No that is just the normal way of providing the password for viking - viking is not the password

I am having a disappointing experience here today:

I have updated my Manjaro and fired Centos in openbox. And it just hangs on boot. All the other Machines do work so this is very disappointing for the "king of stability"

I am sure that the world is full of people who will explain to me that "I only have to"....

But that is the whole point; with Centos you should not have to talk to the "you only have to" people. Centos should work!
So much for stability.
(Still: If you know what I only have to do - please tell me!)
Somehow I doubt that this would have happened with Debian.

viking60 wrote:Somehow I doubt that this would have happened with Debian.

My thumb is up so high it hurts. LAWL!

PS: One of my beefs with Debian (yes, I have some) is that they still have the pkspkr issue that needs to be blacklisted on almost all installs. It doesn't mean that anything is broken, I just find it a little disappointing that nobody has made the error message go away yet.

S.

I have to take everything back. What I tried to fire was an old Centos 6.3 install.
This install was Centos 6.5 and it boots like clockwork.

Sorry Redhat and sorry Centos

I only had to find the right machine - Even Redhat has not entirely solved that bug between the keyboard and the chair.

I will of course have to give Debian an Equally thorough spin now to make the comparison. But Centos holds water so far.
I installed figlet and made a nice Centos 6.5 rules banner. I could not find toilet though...