Minds Eye

Just for kicks (and to see where it is at) I downloaded the latest CentOS 5.2 final and installed it onto my laptop. The idea was to see where the latest offering from RedHat was at in terms of the laptop/desktop world.

Right off the bat during the install the whole process brought back some memories of good 'ole RedHat days. The installer looks the same as it has done for the past 3-4 years and went very smoothly. Nothing unexpected in the whole process and all my hardware was detected and configured correctly, even the sound card produced - wait for it - sound which has given all other ditros grief in the previous 6 months. This had me with a good gut feeling right out of the gate.

As expected none of the packages were of the latest breed, they were all a couple of points behind the bleeding edge. That is what you would expect from an "enterprise" desktop, stability not state of the art. That being said, I had no problem adding the RPMForge repo and installing a few other packages which I needed to have my laptop up and running as a usable and productive machine. I am referring to things like ndiswrapper (because I have a new and unsupported wireless card) and all the gstreamer (because I need to listen to audio for work) add-ons which enable playback of all the bad codecs commonly seen.

Compiz was part of the default install and I needed to grab the NVidia proprietary drivers and install from command line to get it all working. Not that bad or hard to do and understandable coming from an "enterprise" distro who pride themselves on including no proprietary software.

So I have used it for a day (it really only took about 1.5 hrs last night to install and setup) and I am impressed enough to say that this install would be complete and stable enough for my Mother and Mother-in-law for that matter. For me I would like to have access to the bleeding edge installs for things like Banshee-1, Twitux and F-Spot just to name a few.

So for the last couple of months I have been trying out all manner of distros including Fedora9, Fedora 10alpha, Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED10 SP2), openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu 8.04 and now CentOS 5.2. I still keep coming back to the Ubuntu install??? It has all the packages I need available via the multiverse repos and is stable enough that I can suspend my laptop (which works out of the box even when using the proprietary Nvidia drivers) for over a week of work and home computing without rebooting.

In conclusion I would highly recommend the latest CentOS release as a stable, easy to install and up to date distro which "just works" on the latest hardware. That being said I will be switching back to Ubuntu tomorrow mainly because I like to stay closer to the latest software versions, but no close enough for it to break regularly, ie Fedora10alpha (it is alpha though!!)