Recently in CentOS Category

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here.

I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Here are the release notes from the CentOS team.

There are DVDs, CDs and a 7.7MB netinstall image. No live CD yet, but that will be coming soon enough, I figure.

For the past few CentOS releases, I've been trying the live CD just to see what kind of hardware detection I can get on my various PCs. I'll be anxious to give 5.2 a spin because Red Hat is promising better support for laptops.

Already CentOS/Red Hat 5.0 has been pretty good on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. Not so good as to bump Ubuntu or Debian off of it, but good nonetheless.

And Fedora 9 didn't suspend/resume it. So it doesn't look good for CentOS/RHEL 5.2, but I will still give it a try.

One thing that's new about RHEL is that Red Hat has pledged four years of "intensive" support, up from three, followed by what appears to be three years of less-"intensive" support, but support nonetheless.

So you can count on seven years of security patches on any Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and that means CentOS will do the same.

Previously in Click:

• Red Hat's desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?
• Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS
• CentOS 5.2 almost here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — a way bigger deal than you might think

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It's just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is.

I think Red Hat knows this. And it's OK with it.

One day Red Hat bigwigs are saying that they are not interested in aggressively pursuing the Linux desktop market, that Ubuntu has much of it sewn up, and why do it anyway when all the money is in servers and the support Red Hat so richly provides to those who want it?

Good question.

But I see a strategy in there somewhere. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, late of Ziff Davis, now writing just about everywhere else, including his own Practical Technology, has met recently with a bunch of Red Hatters. In SJVN's recent post, the Red Hat people still push Fedora, the community distribution that serves as a testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, but the company is sometimes not-so-quietly working on making its flagship RHEL product a better fit for the desktop — and laptops, too. And Red Hat does see a niche for RHEL apart from the server:

What Red Hat is working on is continuing to make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) business desktop friendly. Whitehurst said many business customers want the Linux desktop. They don't want to move their desktops lock, stock, and barrel to RHEL, or any other Linux desktop. What Fortune 500 companies do want though is to start moving up to 25% of their desktops to Linux.

Why? Because they want the benefits of Linux. Besides the usual advantages of improved TCO (total cost of ownership) and improved security, Red Hat's corporate customers want a Linux desktop that can be carried as a virtual machine on a USB key and can be be managed by Red Hat's management tools. Is this for someone who wants a Windows XP Home replacement? No. It's not. It is, however, something that can catch the attention of CIOs who want a Windows XP Pro replacement.

And who can resist SJVN's money quote from Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst?:

"There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"

It's a riddle, right?

OK, forget about all of that. Just read Red Hat's own press release for RHEL 5.2, which not only talks up all the work they're doing to make suspend/resume work but highlighting the inclusion of desktop applications that aren't a generation too old for office use. I'm talking about OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, the latter of which just had its final release this week.

Here are a few quotes from the RHEL 5.2 press release:

"We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2," said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coodinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. "Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms."

"LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops," said Werner Schmidt, LVM's CIO. "We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months."

The key in all of this is the corporate/enterprise connection, the idea not of wholly changing desktop platforms but bringing needed diversity to the desktop with Linux where appropriate, and leveraging the whole Red Hat relationship with server customers to solve problems on the desktop while adding incremental revenue and giving those customers even more reasons to stick with — and continue paying for — Red Hat.

And all those management tools, most of which I know nothing about, that Red Hat offers to keep servers in line and up to date — all that stuff can also make desktop management a more orderly procedure than the absolute mess that's going on now with Joe Worker's desktop PC.

Not that Ubuntu isn't also working on corporate, managed solutions for desktop PC management, but when it comes to paying for support, Ubuntu doesn't seem to be offering any deep discounts over what Red Hat is charging. And if a huge enterprise already has a lot of Red Hat on the premises, a little more doesn't hurt, right?

And there's another side to this valuable coin: While Ubuntu is mainly thought of as a desktop system, it's no secret at all that parent company Canonical is making a huge push into servers, with certifications coming for use on hardware from any number of vendors, commitments of long-term support and the same kind of sysadmin-helping tools that help leverage things for Red Hat.

So if Ubuntu is leveraging its desktop success to build a potentially lucrative server business, Red Hat needs to expand its own desktop commitment to keep and grow the already lucrative server market it currently dominates.

Who wins?

Damn near everybody, I figure. More competition means better products, most of which can be had for free. Remember, if you don't want to pay for Red Hat, there's always Fedora, or the RHEL clones put together by CentOS and Scientific Linux. And if you're deploying Ubuntu in an enterprise situation, you can pay Canonical, or leverage the substantial Ubuntu community to solve problems.

And while some of us can't imagine paying thousands of dollars a year for support on a server, that kind of thing starts to make sense in the enterprise when you weigh it with your own labor costs.

It's an equation that has worked in Red Hat's favor for a long time. And a few extra variables in said equation are just part of the game.

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it's nice to have choices.

Dag Wieers shows you how on his blog, which I found via Planet CentOS. (Have you noticed that Planet CentOS is a great place to find out stuff?)

It's all courtesy of a project called APT-RPM.

The best way to follow CentOS news is at Planet CentOS, which is just like Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, only more succinct.

All three of these blog-aggregator sites, which collect posts from developers, package maintainers and others involved in their respective Linux projects are very much worth reading on a regular basis.

But the reason for this post is that CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release, according to Tim Verhoeven:

We are currently in the progress of doing QA testing. All packages have been build. The current plan is to be able to finish all QA test this week so we might be able to release 5.2 next weekend or in the days after it.

While Fedora 9 didn't properly suspend/resume my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, I'm still holding out hope that RHEL/CentOS 5.2 will, since greater laptop compatibility is one of the selling points of this significant new RHEL release.

I call it significant because it is bringing some new, very-much-up-to-date versions of popular applications to RHEL/CentOS. Until now, I think that desktop users of RHEL/CentOS have had to be content with Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.

Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn't even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3.

So while the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it's 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren't relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

Another thing about CentOS: Lately CentOS has been releasing a live CD and a small network installer image in addition to the full set of CDs and DVD.

I plan to grab the live CD as soon as it's available to see how the Gateway likes it.

But what about my VIA C3 Samuel test box? It runs CentOS 3.9 and won't boot anything after that ...

At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great

When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I've ever run.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.

I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.

Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I'm still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.

And I'm open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.

But for now, I'm reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL).

The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

When it comes to the up-to-date applications, RHEL purposefully stays behind the curve so as not to break anything, especially on servers. But for desktop users, having to run Firefox 1.5 for-freakin'-ever is a bit of a bummer. Same for OpenOffice; the version I last used (probably in CentOS 4) didn't even have ODF compatibility.

Users of RHEL 5.2 will enjoy the following newish applications:

• Evolution 2.12.3
• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice 2.3.0
• Thunderbird 2.0

This is one of the parts of the release that makes me eager to try RHEL 5.2:

We also significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow us to certify more laptop systems.

Also, many graphics drivers where updated, including a backport of the "intel" graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Bottom line: These improvements make RHEL/CentOS much more attractive on the desktop (and especially for laptop users).

Could this mean a greater push from Red Hat on the desktop, even though the company has stated recently that it will not focus on that very market?

I say yes.

Red Hat 5.0 (OK, in my case the free CentOS 5.0) runs pretty damn well on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), except that Suspend/Resume doesn't work ... and if it did, I would be very happy about it.

The Red Hat release didn't mention the fact that RHEL didn't suffer from the same OpenSSH vulnerability that has affected Debian-derived Linux distros, but the CentOS team does point it out while also telling CentOS users to check suspect keys from users of Debian-based systems that have had SSH contact with your RHEL/CentOS box.

I've heard of quite a few people still running Debian Sarge -- the stable version of Debian before Etch went stable in April 2007. As per Debian policy, support for what is referred to as "old stable," in this case Sarge, is slated to last for a year after the next Debian release is declared "stable" (Etch).

So now we're bumping up on March 31, 2008, and Debian is telling users about the end of updates for Sarge:

One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias 'sarge' the security support for the old distribution (3.1 alias 'sarge') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one year after a new version has been released.

The Debian project released Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' on the 8th of April 2007. Users and Distributors have been given a one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current stable release. Hence, the security support for the old release of 3.1 is going to end in March 2008 as previously announced.

I've heard incredible stories about people running servers with Sarge and having incredible uptimes stretching into full years and beyond. And I'm as loathe to upgrade something that "just works" as much as the next lazy guy, so I understand. Three years seems like a long time ... and if you want more than three years, there's always Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific Linux and Novell's Suse (really just Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones CentOS and Scientific Linux, because what kind of cheap person like myself is going to pay year after year for updates?).

But going three years without needing to do a reinstall is a pretty great thing. And if you start with a Debian release before it goes stable -- like Debian Lenny, which is still in Testing but appears pretty darn reliable to me -- you'll probably get more than three years. At this point, I imagine that most Debian users think of Etch -- the current Stable -- as too old. That's true for desktop users, but if your hardware likes Etch, I really see no reason to move to Lenny unless you want newer versions of all of the packages.

For me, Lenny is working pretty well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and Etch is doing great on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). And this desktop/server I just set up? I used Etch just because I know it works. And I know that getting Lenny to perform well on the Gateway means I'll be able to stick with it for what could be four years (but actually might be less because the wait between Etch and Lenny becoming stable is probably going to be much shorter than the wait between Sarge and Etch ... or at least that's what I think is going to happen).

Yeah, I probably won't be running Lenny three years from now ... but you never know. As I said recently, Lenny is looking very, very good.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers.

It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release. And even though the next Ubuntu release -- 8.04 (due 4/08 ... also known as April 2008) -- is going to be a Long Term Support release, with fixes, patches and the like for three years on the desktop, five years on the server, there's still quite a bit of time left for the current Ubuntu LTS, which will be supported until June 2009 on the desktop and June 2011 on the server.

The new installer -- you don't really need it if you can successfully use the old installer, already have a 6.06 LTS install (like I do) and have done all the updates -- underscores Canonical's commitment to the LTS concept. While the twice-yearly releases of Ubuntu get most of the light and heat in the uber-geek community, there are many who depend on the relative stability of the LTS release to keep their hardware running. That's especially true on servers, where major upgrades every six months are impractical at best and detrimential at worst -- nobody wants to break a system that's been running well.

And the LTS is vital as a counterweight to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop, both of which are supported for years on end.

I'd like to say that Debian Stable (currently Etch) and Old Stable (Sarge) are equivalents, but since you can't pin down a date certain for length of their support, there is a bit of an unknown factor there, although once the Stable release goes to Old Stable, you pretty much know that the new Stable release won't give you too many problems.

Sure, many desktop users generally want something more cutting-edge, mainly something like the regular Ubuntu releases, but there are many people -- and many situations -- that warrant hanging on to a Linux installation as long as possible. Over the time I've used Ubuntu and Xubuntu (from 6.06 LTS through 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10), I've seen some parts of the installation improve dramatically, I've seen hardware work better, then worse, and occasionally not at all.

And we all know an individual or organization that hates doing major upgrades, ever. Those coming from a Windows or Macintosh background aren't all used to major OS upgrades. In the case of Windows AND Mac's OS X, major upgrades almost always cost money. $129 for an OS X upgrade might not sound like much, but paying that much every couple of years when your computer runs just fine the way it is? No thanks. That's why I'm still running OS X 10.3 on my Mac. And Windows? I have a disc for Windows 2000, and I'm not about to pay ANYTHING for the privilege of upgrading my sole Windows box (which I boot maybe twice a year) to XP.

And in Linux, just because we can change out distros 10 times a day if we wish, it doesn't mean that we have to -- or should. For people who crave the stability of long-term releases, one thing generally drives upgrade: newer software they need to get their work done, and new hardware that needs new software to run properly.

I did this most recent Ubuntu 6.06 LTS installation for testing purposes, but I've stuck with it because it just works. On this test box, it's flawless. On my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, it manages the fan as well as 7.10 (i.e. not at all without a cron job; but well with said cron job), but less well than 7.04 (which has the ACPI working with no coding needed). (Note: I'm not currently running Ubuntu at all on the Gateway laptop, which is currently dual-booting the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny, which I upgraded from the stable Etch.)

Using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this test box, sure I'm stuck with Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice 2.0, GMOME 2.14.3 and Evolution 2.6.1, but everything works. And there's nothing I do that I can't do with applications of this "vintage." If I this machine had wireless and it didn't work with 6.06, I might feel differently about LTS, but with the hardware I have now, LTS is a good fit.

So if you're looking for stable, supported releases, especially ones that won't cost you anything, it's nice to have Ubuntu LTS as a choice along with CentOS and Scientific Linux (both free versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SUSE, Debian and Slackware.

As far as stable, long-term releases go, I have run CentOS (3.9. 4.2 and 5), Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Slackware (12), as well as Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu holds up very well on the desktop in this crowd. It's more flexible, as far as adding software, than CentOS and Slackware -- it doesn't have as many packages as Debian, but it does have plenty -- and the desktop and menus are a bit more tame than Debian's, with a better out-of-the-box experience, especially for inexperienced users.

And the support available from other Ubuntu users is a major component of the distro's success. All the advice may not be of the best quality, but there's just so much of it that you're bound to find the right answer to whatever it is you're asking. Not that the Debian community isn't helpful (I love DebianHELP and the Debian User Forums, but they just don't have the sheer volume of the Ubuntu Forums. Like I said, there's a lot more noise among the Ubuntu people ... but that's the price you pay, I guess.

And since Ubuntu is based on Debian, what you learn in one community is more often than not directly applicable in the other.

Another thing I discovered today: I enjoy reading the Planet Debian blog posts from Debian developers, and I had no idea that there's a Planet Ubuntu as well. Both are more than worth adding to your favorites and checking on from time to time.

Over the past year, I've used both Debian and Ubuntu extensively, and I always say that Debian isn't as "hard" to use as some would make it appear. Nor is Ubuntu a relative cakewalk. Both require, at times, a bit of wading into the muck to make things work. As far as installation goes, Debian's installer -- upon which Ubuntu's "alternate" installer is very closely based, is quite good, and has succeeded for me many more times than Ubuntu's live CD and alternate-CD discs, but Ubuntu works often enough.

What Ubuntu has that Debian lacks is a marketing plan. For some -- especially the average Linux user (read: geek) -- having no marketing plan is, in and of itself, a marketing plan of sorts. Nobody's trying to make Debian "cool," or giving you reasons why you should or shouldn't run it. And while there are a few Debian evangelists out there, and a few for Slackware as well, there's nothing approaching the fervor over Ubuntu.

That might be good, or bad, depending on how you look at it.

A lot of people are running Debian and Slackware -- they're just quieter about it, I guess.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for far too long. All I want to say is that I'm in favor of long-term, "stable" releases with defined periods of support and a smooth upgrade path, and I'm glad that Ubuntu has pretty big foot in this very door.

And I like the fact that 6.06 LTS will be supported for over a year after the next LTS -- 8.04 -- is released a few months from now.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable.

But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

For those who don't know, the corporate world, when it uses Linux, pretty much splits its loyalty between Red Hat and Novell's Suse. Both cost money but include either Web or telephone support.

And when it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the server and desktop, there's another, freer way.

CentOS. Since everything based on Linux and the GNU software tools that make it run is subject to the GPL license -- making all sources open and the code freely distributable and modifiable -- CentOS is carving its own sizable niche in the Linux landscape with its clones of Red Hat Linux distributions. You can get everything from version 2 to the current version 5.

And you don't have to pay a thing.

And since Red Hat recently upped its flagship RHEL 5 product to version 5.1, CentOS has done the same with its clone. (It usually takes a couple weeks or so for CentOS to get the changes from upstream and roll them into their own distro).

So if you want a Red Hat-like system for your desktop or server -- or just want to see how it runs (very well, in my tests), give CentOS a try.

One of the best things about Red Hat and CentOS is the Anaconda installer. It's the best I've seen. (Yes, that means better than Ubuntu, too.) And you can count on quite a few years of support for any of these releases. They're still supporting Version 2, I believe.

But for me, the biggest news is that there is now a netinstall image for CentOS. That's a big deal, because you usually need to download two or three ISO images and burn each on a separate CD to get the full CentOS distribution on your computer. I think the netinstall process for Debian is one of its great strengths, and having a similar image for CentOS is, indeed, a great thing.

Note: If I was about to do a CentOS install, I'd get the netinstall image, but there's also a single DVD image for those with DVD burners (I don't have one; I'm still stuck in the CD era). At least that way you can do the full install without a networking connection. It's nice to have choices, at any rate.

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.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes. He commented on my previous CentOS odyssey, which led me to install version 3.9 on my VIA C3-equipped test box. He said CentOS 4.5 would run on it. I had previously tried the 4.4 live CD, and that wouldn't boot, so I never bothered to burn a 4.5 install disc.

Johnny was right. I did burn the first CentOS 4.5 disc, and typing i586 at the boot prompt worked.

So I'm about to redo this drive as CentOS 4.5. If I don't think about the fact that the sound is kind of screwed up, CentOS 3.9 is a very, very good desktop operating system, one that I would definitely recommend for small to medium sized businesses as well as the enterprise. It's a great implementation of GNOME, and KDE is also here if you want it.

Will CentOS 4.5 perform as well or better? It's time to find out.

It's not in the "one small step for man" category, but my quest to run something -- anything -- from Red Hat on my VIA C3 Samuel-equipped test box has finally been successful. But not without a lot of effort.

The current versions of Fedora and Red Hat clones Scientific Linux and CentOS -- live CDs, install CDs, net-install CDs -- wouldn't just refuse to install, they wouldn't even boot. I tried special boot codes. Nothing.

Then it dawned on me: CentOS, the leading clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, doesn't just offer its current release, CentOS 5. It also has versions 2, 3 and 4 -- all still receiving support in the form of security updates. Maybe I could go back in time, in Linux time anyway, to an era when Red Hat wasn't so hostile to the VIA C3 Samuel.

So I downloaded and burned the CentOS 4.4 Live CD. It wouldn't boot, either.

Not to be deterred, I downloaded the ISOs for the first discs of CentOS 3.9 and 2.1.

CentOS 2.1 downloaded first, and unlike versions 5 and 4.4, it booted successfully into a graphical installer. Everything looked good, but I wanted to install CentOS on one of my hard drive's pre-existing partitions. The installer wouldn't continue unless I set the target partition as the root partition. I didn't know whether or not that would break the triple-boot situation that I have going on this drive (currently Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17). I already blew out GRUB with the Puppy install and didn't feel like going through that again -- this week, at least. (I was able to get everything to boot again after a bit of amateur hackery. Through it all, Slackware always booted, by the way.)

For those who don't know, CentOS is a nearly exact copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- as close as the CentOS people can get it (and that's very, very close) for users who want to use RHEL but don't want to pay Red Hat for support they either don't want or need.

Now that CentOS 5 (and by extension RHEL 5) is out, CentOS 2 seems positively ancient. But it's not: The Distrowatch announcement of CentOS 2 Final was on May 25, 2004. That's three years ago for those a little shaky on the math.

The first ISO of my CentOS 3.9 install set finally came through. I swapped in a hard drive that would be dedicated to this install -- no dual-booting.

I chose the graphical install. It worked. This version, unlike CentOS 2, allowed me to configure my wheel mouse. A good sign. Throughout the install process, the help on the left side of the screen is appreciated.

The next screen allowed me to choose from four types of installs: Personal Desktop, Workstation, Server and Custom. I chose Personal Desktop.

And since I had a whole drive devoted to this install, I chose Automatically Partition on the Disk Partitioning Setup screen.

In Boot Loader Configuration, there is the provision to password-protect the GRUB bootloader. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't need it at present.

I kept going in the installer -- this is Anaconda, I believe -- and as graphical installers go, it's a very good one. I like how it shows the number of packages being installed, how many are done, how many are left, all listed with times elapsed and remaining.

My geeky self was getting a little giddy at the thought of running something that smells of Red Hat. CentOS 3.9 may not be CentOS 5, but this 3.9 release is dated July 26, 2007 -- not even two months old. And according to CentOS, it will be supported with maintenance updates until Oct. 31, 2010. Even CentOS 2 is still being supported with security patches, and that support will continue until May 31, 2009. So if CentOS does work for your setup, you can stay with it. I imagine every release of CentOS will be supported as long as Red Hat supports the releases on which they're based. In other words, a long time.

I'll take it.

If, for some reason, you have hardware frozen in time (and I most certainly do) that runs well on one of these older distributions, it's nice to know there are distributions out there that are committed to true long-term support.

(A few days pass)

I finally got to use CentOS 3.9. I know it's old, and yes, there are quite a few apps that don't work so well. OpenOffice is version 1.1.2, meaning no ODF support. It's strange that OO is not even version 2, but instead of GAIM there's the very-new Pidgin on the system. Must have something to do with security. I like Pidgin and use it every day, so nothing's lost there.

One problem: There's no way, no how, to get AbiWord on this thing, and after screwing around with yum and rpm for awhile, I did get the flash plugin installed but struck out with the Ted word processor, even though I had a bona fide RPM of it. It installed, but then it wouldn't run, even from a terminal. And I couldn't find the GNOME app that lets you add things to the menus.

I took a peek at Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" for a quick how-to on RPMs, and it doesn't seem like I'm doing anything wrong, but Ted still won't load.

Also, XMMS didn't work with .mp3 files (it's not supposed to -- for some reason Red Hat purposefully doesn't include the proper CODECs). But it won't work with .ogg files, either. Nothing happens. And while my sound does work -- the test sound plays perfectly -- there's no audio in any browser (SeaMonkey is the default here). Hmmmm.

But there are many good things bout this ol' Red Hat clone:

The install is on three CDs, and I never needed the third one. It's nice to get both the GNOME and KDE desktops installed by default and be able to experience both without having to do much of anything. Both GNOME and KDE run pretty well on my old hardware (I think the VIA C3 is running a lot slower than its rated 1 GHz -- maybe half that, and I'm working with a 133 MHz FSB, 256 MB of RAM).

It's kind of cool how in GNOME the menus show Gedit, but in KDE you get Kate. Pretty slick.

Konqueror runs way faster here than in newer distros. I think that the browser/file manager got some kind of major makeover, because I remember it being this fast in the old, now-orphaned MepisLite but was surprised to find out how slow it has been in recent distros (Slackware 12, SimplyMepis 5). It's fast here, all right, but not so great on most Web pages -- CSS rendering isn't working all that great.

The Add/Remove Applications utility works very well. I used it to beef up KDE with ... everything they had. Everything, in this case didn't include KOffice. I understand that this is due to Red Hat's decision to support OpenOffice above all other office software. No AbiWord, no Ted, and no KOffice. That's a mistake -- Red Hat (and by extension CentOS) would do its users nothing but good by giving them a choice in office suites. I'd be OK with it if they were only shipping GNOME, but if you include KDE, you really should put KOffice with it.

I couldn't get my network printer to work with the Red Hat/CentOS utility, but now that I've used the CUPS Web-browser interface successfully a few times, I went in that direction and got networked printing going in about two minutes.

The GIMP is back at version 1.2. The good thing is that it loads in 15 seconds. That's way faster than the current version loads in just about any OS I use.

The older version of OpenOffice, on the other hand, is much slower. It takes a full minute and then some to load the Writer application. The OO team must've tightened it up a bit since then, because 2.2 runs better than this older version. And I'm uncomfortable without ODF support.

RHEL/CentOS desktop users -- not that Red Hat has much stake in or focus on the desktop -- pretty much have to make due with OpenOffice. I'm sure there's a way to add KOffice, AbiWord, even Ted, but the official repositories don't have those applications. And as I write above, I was unsuccessful in getting Ted to install. Well, it's installed -- I just can't run it.

It could be me. This is my first experience with anything derived from Red Hat, and I didn't exactly spend the weekend studying up on it. But so far, Debian and Ubuntu are obviously easier to deal with when it comes to adding packages. Even Slackware is easier. I figured out how to add a Slack package pretty easily. I'm doing something wrong with rpm and yum, I just don't know what.

Otherwise, both the GNOME and KDE environments in CentOS 3.9 are quite complete. All the tools you'd expect in the somewhat older incarnations of these desktops are there.

One RPM that did install right was Flash. I followed the instructions from the Adobe site, and upon relaunching Seamonkey, I had Flash video. Still no sound, but could at least watch a silent YouTube.

For a moment, if I can forget all the stuff that didn't work -- sound, installing software NOT in the main repositories -- the Red Hat/CentOS desktop would make an excellent install for corporate environments. It seems solid and has an excellent installer. And the lengthy period of support in the form of security patches is exactly what a typical business needs. Do you think my company-maintained Windows XP box gets a visit from the IT department once a month unless I have a problem? Once a year? It NEVER gets any attention unless I ask for it.

That's the reality out there, and the more a Linux desktop can have a set-it-and-forget-it configuration, the better it will fare in most corporate settings. Nothing that is re-released every six months -- or even every year -- will ever take hold in most office situations. And some people don't like change. That's what Red Hat (and, again, by extension CentOS) is all about in the server market.

The same philosophy applies to the office desktop -- keep it simple, keep it the same, keep it secure. On Windows, nothing is all that simple or secure -- but it sure is the same. With that in mind, a little sameness on the desktop isn't such a bad thing when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of users in a single company.

Until I get a better testing environment running (and I am close), I'll only be able to speculate on how much CentOS 5 has improved the desktop experience. I suspect quite a bit. But based on what I see in 3.9, if you want a secure, stable desktop workhorse, you could do a whole lot worse than the rock-solid CentOS.

My test box seems to like Debian-based distros and dislike Fedora and SUSE. I've never been able to get Fedora, SUSE to even boot, in fact, on this VIA C7-equipped ECS EVEm motherboard. Early in the booting process, the system resets itself, and just keeps rebooting, never getting anywhere.

So on my test box, I give up, but the Red Hat-derived CentOS 5.0 and Scientific Linux 5.0 do load in my Dell Optiplex 3 GHz Pentium 4 work box, on which I can explore them as live CDs but not actually install them to the hard drive.

CentOS 5.0 loads OK, if a little slow (it was flummoxed for a minute by an unused SATA port), but upon launch looks much like Fedora, which is should, since CentOS is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. It's a way to get Red Hat functionality for servers and desktops without paying Red Hat fees.

Just like in Fedora, CentOS runs a nice GNOME desktop with the usual apps. But there's no information anywhere on the root password, so I can't configure my static IP and get Internet into the box. If you have a DHCP connection, no doubt this isn't a problem, and you might like using a RHEL workalike. But since I need to do a little configuration, the CentOS live CD isn't of all that much use to me.

So I pump the Scientific Linux CD into the Dell. It's another RHEL clone, this one made by a group of real scientists, including those at Fermilab.

During the boot process for Scientific Linux, I'm told the root password is sluser; so are the standard, non-root login and password. Simple enough.

It boots, and since Scientific Linux, like CentOS, is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the app choices look pretty much the same. Only the desktop art looks different. I'm quite comfortable in GNOME, since I also have a Debian box that is set up with it.

So I configure the network. I've never done a static IP configuration (or any other kind) in Red Hat before, and it takes me a few minutes. But I manage to get Internet flowing through the box. I also start Open Office Writer on one workspace, the GIMP on the next.

Even though this is a live CD, things are surprisingly snappy (I'm running with 512 MB of RAM). Since Scientific Linux is a RHEL clone, I give much credit to Red Hat. While the Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux leader is known for its server installs, this system is functioning quite well indeed as my desktop for the moment, and I wouldn't hesitate at this point to make Scientific Linux (or Fedora or RHEL, for that matter) my default desktop OS.

Now I haven't tried to install any additional apps, and I am running this on my best box, so this all goes for a new, modern system. I'm not saying that Dell made an error in shipping their new non-Windows desktops and laptops with Ubuntu, but here I am using a polished desktop environment, Flash is already installed, sound works right away with no configuration, and the thing is more responsive than Ubuntu, at least in this live CD environment (the Ubuntu live CD doesn't run nearly as well, but since I haven't done a Linux install to this box, I can't vouch for the way it works with a hard drive install).

Before I reboot and get back to my "real" work, I figure I'll try to install some applications and see how that works. I go to the Applications menu and select Add/Remove Software. There's not much there -- most of the apps are already installed. I have Open Office, but I want to install AbiWord. Where is it?

I find Yum. I figure out how to add the repositories. Then Yum crashes. I reload. I add repositories again. I can't seem to find AbiWord, but it just might not be there. Clearly I need some Red Hat tutoring. That's where six months of Debian, apt and Synaptic will get you ...

But overall I'm impressed with Scientific Linux (and by extension RHEL). Aside from the package-management trouble (which at this point I think is solely due to my inability to figure it out), this is a fine desktop setup. And did I mention that it's fast?

All I need now is a new PC that I can install either CentOS, Scientific Linux or Fedora on -- maybe Dell will sell me one.