CentOS - Sep 2005 - FWIW...

Good morning, everyone...

Perhaps this will either help or encourage others interested in using
CentOS as a networked workstation. It is based upon my experiences, and
all other disclaimers apply.

1. I did a basic workstation install from 4.1 CD's deploying KDE and Gnome
desktops and, other than a few minor issues, mostly of my making,
everything went smoothly. The install process is excellent, fairly cogent
and straightforward. 

2. I have used the Rekall database development application with MySQL for
nearly a year under various permutations of Linux, most notably Debian and
Mandriva. Since it is not delivered with CentOS, I was forced to locate
and download the source. I also downloaded and compiled the xbase and
xbsql (auxiliary utilities for Xbase) packages with no problems
encountered, whatsoever. 

3. Another favored application, the Pan Newsreader, has a dependency, the
gnet libraries, which I found as a RedHat RPM, on rpmfind.net. Then I
simply downloaded the latest Pan build, which has a number of bug fixes in
BETA, and installed it from RPM. If you are going to use the latest Pan
builds, you will need gnet >=2.04. 

[Glitches encountered]

1. I have not had the time to RTFM about XSane and its wicked permissions,
yet. For the moment, however, I am resorting to firing off XSane as the
super-user, since it will not work otherwise. I know it's in the manuals,
I just haven't had the time to read the manuals that much, yet. ;-)

2. Of course, as nearly always is the case, regardless of which platform
I've been using, I had to manually install the Java runtime and create a
link for it in my Firefox configuration. It's not really a glitch; more
like it is a fact of life. 

3. KDE's kdetoys doesn't apparently come with CentOS. However, that is a
project for yet another day, when I have time to truly explore it further.
I probably will have to install it from source if I want the weather in my
task bar. <sigh> I tried to install it from source, and there are errors
from the source. Oh, well. 

Life goes on.

Dave
-- 
Dave Laird (Dave at kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project 
                                           
An automatic & random fortune for the Minute:    
Life is like an egg stain on your chin -- you can lick it, but it still
won't go away.

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On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 08:47, Dave Laird wrote:
> Perhaps this will either help or encourage others interested in using
> CentOS as a networked workstation. It is based upon my experiences, and
> all other disclaimers apply.
[...]
> 2. Of course, as nearly always is the case, regardless of which platform
> I've been using, I had to manually install the Java runtime and create
a
> link for it in my Firefox configuration. It's not really a glitch; more
> like it is a fact of life. 
You might be interested in the k12ltsp distribution: they rebuild fedora
and now centos4 isos to include some extra stuff - mostly the ltsp
package to permit network booting of thin clients and some educational
packages.  They also add some push-button links to get some additional
software that can't be included - one of these gets the jre and plugin.
Isos are at: 
    ftp://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/pub/K12LTSP/4.4.1/iso/
or
    rsync -Pav k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us::K12LTSP/ .

-- 
  Les mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 06:47 -0700, Dave Laird wrote:
> 2. Of course, as nearly always is the case, regardless of which platform
> I've been using, I had to manually install the Java runtime and create
a
> link for it in my Firefox configuration. It's not really a glitch; more
> like it is a fact of life. 
Yeah. There are yum packages (especially if you use dag's repository)
for things like Flash and of course mplayer for quicktime. But for Java
you do have to symlink the plugin. That's been life with Linux for some
time. The only distros that do/did that out of the box are ones like
SuSE, which pay Sun to package Java with the distro. I prefer it this
way, personally, though, as a Java developer. This way I hand-install
everything, I have exactly the version I want and I know where it's
located.
> Life goes on.
It's a great desktop, but as with anything, it all depends on how you
plan on using it. If games or multimedia running out of the box are
important, then Ubuntu is probably a better bet. Otherwise, I find
CentOS to be the best workstation distro I've ever used.

Preston