Centos 5.1 Review

CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System. As a group, CentOS is a community of open source contributors and users. Typical CentOS users are organizations and individuals that do not need strong commercial support in order to achieve successful operation. CentOS is 100% compatible rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution requirements. CentOS is for people who need an enterprise class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support. CentOS is currently ranked #12 at distrowatch

Test Machine
Pentium D 3.4 GHz with 2 gig of RAM, Nvidia 7300GS with 256 meg RAM and 19" wide screen monitor. For this review I am using 64 bit edition.

Booting
The installation DVD does not come with a Live environment. A separate Live CD is available for people interested in checking the environment first.
Fedora and CentOS are amongst the earliest distributions to correctly bring 1440x900@75Hz desktop resolution.

Installation
CentOS uses Anaconda as the system installer. As with the other distributions that use Anaconda; it is really simple to install CentOS without actually burning a DVD. User can install the system from the hard disk containing the ISO image. For detailed description see the installation section in my earlier post.

Anaconda asks for the language, keyboard and allows you to configure partitions. The network configuration tool has been updated and user can separately configure IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Earlier it was not possible to assign static IP to one and leave the other one on DHCP, but thats not the case now. Anaconda then asks for time zone, root password and the packages to be installed.

User can select additional repositories during package selection, but I did not try that out. The package selection categories made me laugh. Emacs and Editors are different categories :). Seems like Emacs is not an editor any more, but far more better/superior than editors. And even though the fact that Emacs is not in the latest 22 version.

Aesthetics
CentOS comes with a light blue theme and the theme is very well integrated(even with Compiz). The default font set was "Sans" (I personally do not like Sans), which I changed to "Dejavu Sans". For a Sever/Workspace oriented distribution, the look and feel is nice.

Applications
Being a DVD install there are a huge number of applications. I would say that I was really disappointed by version of applications used by CentOS (Red Hat). Firefox is in version 1.5.0.12 and Open Office is in a really old version 2.0.4. But this rant is more appropriate for Red Hat. Pirut is again disappointing as it fails/hangs a lot.

Additional applications can be downloaded from the repository. But the repository seems to be stagnant. There is not even a single application in the main extra repository. Some applications are present in extra testing repository but they are not sufficient. The repository for CentOS 4 is full of all kinds of useful applications.

Multimedia
There is no out-of-box multimedia support in CentOS, and hopelessly the official repository lacks the required binary packages. So if you are looking for multimedia functionality, you have to look of other unofficial repositories or compile the applications/codecs from source.

Eye Candy
Compiz is installed by default and provides basic eye-candy. But for enabling it, proprietary graphics card drivers need to be installed and /etc/X11/xorg.conf needs to be tweaked.

Conclusion
CentOS is just a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and really a good clone. But it seems to be going into dangerous waters. The most disappointing aspect was the lack of good and complete official repository(which is not the case with CentOS 4). It is a really good distribution for server/workstation users who do not want to pay extortion money to Red Hat. But for casual desktop user, I advise to stay clear.

Fedora 8 Review

Nice new beautiful fedora.
Fedora (previously called Fedora Core) is an RPM-based, general purpose Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

According to the project website: "Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project." Currently Fedora is ranked #4 at distrowatch.

Test Machine
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ with 2 gig of RAM, Nvidia 6600GS with 256 meg RAM and 19" wide screen monitor.

Booting
Fedora comes in different flavors: KDE Live, Gnome Live, Games Live, Developer Live, Fedora Electronic Lab Live and the standard DVD install. For this review, I picked up the 64-bit standard install DVD.

I really like Red Hat based distribution from installation point of view. There is no need to burn a CD/DVD for installation. You can have a hard disk installation. This is really cool. No need to burn extra DVDs and then throw them out after six months.

On initial boot, after installation, Fedora brought up X with the correct resolution 1440x900@75Hz. Fedora did the same in version 7 as well, making it the first distribution to correctly setup Graphics for my machine (neither XP nor vista) can do this)!

Installation
Red Hat uses anaconda for installation. Anaconda is really easy and highly configurable installer and is used by a lot of other distributions as there standard installer.

Here I would take some time to describe the hard disk installation process. The user needs three things: a partition(fat32 or ext3) that can be read by the installer, an ISO reading application (e.g. WinRAR) and a Linux boot loader (e.g. lilo, grub or NTLDR).

Copy the ISO file to a free partition; which is readable by installer. Now use the ISO reader application to extract /isolinux/vmlinuz & /isolinux/initrd.img. Now create a new Loader entry with these files to the desired partition. You might have to google for more information specific to the Loader you are using. For grub, the new entries for the second partition on primary hard disk, should be like this:

title Install
kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz ro vga=791
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd.img

Now reboot the machine and select the Install option. Anaconda will come up and ask for language and keyboard. Then anaconda will ask for the partition containing the ISO image file. Once anaconda finds the desired image, it will start as normal.

Aesthetics
As mentioned in the title, werewolf (Fedora 8) looks are simply breath-taking. Tango icon theme is now default, the fonts look awesome.

Applications
Being a DVD install, there are a lot of applications, and all of them are in the latest version. Open Office 2.3 is there for office application, and Firefox 2.0.0.8 is installed for web browsing. I had some problems with Firefox; initially it refused to come up. I had to kill all the running Firefox instances (by executing "killall firefox"), and Firefox came up fine the next time.

The default applications present on DVD are undergoing a massive change. A lot of applications are missing out. Gvim is dropped, whereas emacs is in the latest version 22.1. Gnome configuration editor is dropped, one thing I personally don't like. But I consider these as side-effects of a massive change. The changes are not yet stabilized, and we can hope to see a stabilized set of applications, tuned to community preferences in future.

Software installation is still a mess. Pirut almost hangs whenever invoked. It would be better to see Pirut as a more responsive applicaiton.

Multimedia
Red Hat is staying clear from proprietary codecs, as a result, out-of-box multimedia support is missing from Fedora. Codec buddy is installed for making codec installation easy, but I ran out of luck while trying to use it. While playing MP3, Amarok simply crashed. And while playing WMV files, codec buddy was unable to find any suitable plug-in.

Eye Candy
Fedora comes with latest compiz fusion, but is not enabled by default. For Nvidia graphics card, I enabled 3D acceleration by compiling proprietary Nvidia drivers from source. Also some additional parameters are required in xorg.conf.

Conclusion
Red Hat ruled the Linux distribution world, before Ubuntu came and took over. With the current release for Fedora, it seems that Red Hat is fighting really hard to control the lost ground. The intense effort is clear from the current release. If we ignore minor hick-ups, werewolf is one of the best releases from Fedora. With this release Fedora is returning to my workstation as distribution of choice, after a long time.