A few weeks ago, one of my students mentioned that his brother uses CentOS at work for all their servers. It stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System, and is essentially RedHat Enterprise Linux re-released with a few tweaks.
I’ve noticed that most distro reviews tend to focus on the install, but I won’t do that. I’ll simlpy say that it’s fairly identical to Fedora 4’s, and let it go at that. I assume it’s truly identical to RHEL’s, with a different logo.
I did something different with this install, I chose the "server" option, rather than "custom" like I always have before. It let me review it, so I could see if I liked it, and it did turn out to save me a little time. I only did minimal tweaking.
Total install from start to finish was 9 minutes. I have never done an install that fast. I can only imagine that it’s because I didn’t install any GUI stuff. I did a yum update as soon as I finished the install, and it only got 5 packages, so that was fast too.
So far, it’s done two things out of the box that the previous distro (debian) wasn’t doing for me; seeing my hyperthreading processor as a dual, and recognizing my external USB drive. That means I can put my backed up data back on there at ~480Mbps rather than the ~100Mbs over ssh I used to take it off.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with it. An interesting side note is that my USB drive is 80G, and my OS saw it as having 77G available. I didn’t know how big all my backed up data would be, but it turned out to be 76G. Spooky.
