Dollars and CentOS 4.5: Updating Up2date

I'm at the tail end of my CentOS 4.5 install. Once again, I continue to be impressed with the Anaconda installer. It's one of the best I've seen. It gives you a lot of freedom to pick which packages you want to install. I bulked up on the KDE -- I wanted everything to be as ready as it could be when the install finished.

Once the install was done, I clicked the icon to run up2date. It seemed to be taking forever and then I noticed the notes in one of the boxes: Up2date needs to be up to date before using it. So I opened a terminal and used yum to update up2date. Then I clicked the update icon again, and everything started flowing.

I'm in the middle of an hour-plus update (the first one always hurts). During the install, there were a lot of useful messages about documentation and how to run the system. One thing I'll have to do is look on the CentOS site for how to get some kind of version 2 of OpenOffice. CentOS 4.5 still runs version 1.1.5, and I really want to have ODF compatibility. But since my last endeavor to add outside software to CentOS 3.9 went so poorly, I'm a little update-shy about it.

One thing's annoying me: The screen saver is password-protected. I think that's a good default for security's sake, but the first thing I'm going to do is turn that off. It's annoying.

So far the desktop looks great, and if they do one thing -- and that thing is making sound work in applications -- I'll be happy.

(the next day ...)

My Up2date of the rest of the system died overnight. I restarted it. Most of the files downloaded fine and were somewhere in /var, but even so, it took forever for the installation process to really get going.

I did eventually have a fully updated CentOS 4.5 box. This is the newest (and probably last) Red Hat-derived distribution I will be able to run on this machine.

One good thing: CentOS 4.5 is light years ahead of CentOS 3.9. Everything is updated. I still want a newer version of OpenOffice (see the comments to this post to find out how to get one).

And unlike in CentOS 3.9, in this version, sound works. I got the RPM package for Flash, installed it and checked it out. Video is as choppy as any distro on this box -- I didn't expect anything better -- but at least sound worked.

During the install, I chose to have XMMS as one of my extra packages. CentOS (and, presumably, Red Hat) still doesn't play MP3s, and I still couldn't get it to play an OGG file, either.

Other than that, the GNOME desktop works great. KDE was, predictably, a little slower, but since I added every KDE extra I could, there's plenty of software on this box.

Another curious thing: I let the installer automatically take over the entire drive, and I think it used LVM (logical volume management), because when I run gparted from the Puppy live CD, there are only two partitions, a very small /boot and another one with "unknown" file type. I don't know enough about LVM at this point, but it does appear to be working fine.

The Internet was VERY slow today in this building, so I couldn't really comment on how Net-based apps were running, but as in CentOS 3.9, OpenOffice is very, very slow to load. Curiously, the Nautilus file manager opens very quickly when the Home icon is clicked, and menus appear almost instantly, which is not the case in all distros I've used with this hardware.

I continue to be impressed with the way CentOS/Red Hat is laid out. There are tons of management tools, and mousing over just about anything on the screen causes small "help" boxes to open up. Nice touch.

Again, it's nice to have both GNOME and KDE loaded up, but would it kill them to offer Xfce, Fluxbox and IceWM during the install process as well? I guess RHEL is all about the enterprise -- the corporate desktop -- and that means GNOME or KDE, so I'll shut up about it.

I did turn off the password-protection on the screen saver, and I also tweaked the sleep settings for the monitor. Configuration in CentOS/Red Hat is very straightforward, and ACPI works perfectly.

One significant upgrade from 3.9 to 4.5. Firefox is the default browser in lieu of Seamonkey.

I don't know much about the upcoming Red Hat Global Desktop, which I presume will be cheaper than the current $80 for RHEL's desktop version, but if Red Hat gets serious about pursuing the desktop market and really gets under the hood to make a better desktop experience, they could be a significant player in the corporate desktop space where security, ease of administration and low cost are priorities. And if you don't need Red Hat's support, CentOS is there to give you the whole distro for nothing.