Subscribe to my feedCentOS Linux 5.1
As I posted earlier, I recently got myself a Thinkpad X31. It's a nice and sturdy laptop, but being a 12-incher, it lacks an optical drive. I've been using Kubuntu/Ubuntu 7.10 for the past months, and all was well.
But then I found my system in a chaotic an polluted state. I had files pretty much all over my home dir, and installing both Gnome and KDE on a single system, along with tons of extra software caused my menus to become overpopulated. Katapult helped to keep me from spending minutes looking for the right application launcher in the system menu, I still felt the need for a reformat.
I decided on Xubuntu, as it shared the Debian underpinnings of Ubuntu I was familiar with. Xubuntu uses the XFCE Desktop, which is light as a feather compared to KDE or Gnome, and still offers a decent user experience.
I started an install from my USB stick, which is really easy, I'll explain how to put virtually every install/live CD into a USB stick later. Everything went well, and everything worked out of the box. Except for sound. I tried getting sound to work, but apparently it's an unresolved issue with the ICH7 chips found in many Centrino systems.
While this may seem like a minor issue to some, I kind of like listening to music, and sound also comes in handy when working on a project for a course called "Sonology and Acoustics".
So with pain in my heart, I started looking for an alternative. I first tried openSUSE but it refused to install from my USB key. This brought me to CentOS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux based distro.
Installing went perfectly, and the good old sound test at the end of any Red Hat install played the test sound without any trouble. Yey for corporate linux distributions!
CentOS worked fine at first, but there are MANY drawbacks. First of all, it's Red Hat based, which means
rpm's and yum. And yum is really, really the worst package manager ever created by man. apt-get,
aptitude and pacman are simply in a completely different league. Yum is slow, unintuitive and unreliable.
A few examples:
- Searching requires the use of escaped wildcards:
yum search kernelwill not list all packages with 'kernel' in their name, instead it will look for a package named kernel. The correct command would beyum search *kernel*. How shitty is that? - Running
yum install somepackagewill just print "Nothing to be done" if somepackage doesn't exist, instead of alerting the user that the package could not be found. - Yum always looks for updated lists of packages online. So when you're offline,
yum searchandyum installwon't work without extra effort.
These are just a few of the issues I ran into the last few hours. There are bound to be more. Maybe it just takes getting used to, but still - I'm not convinced.
The lack of packages (such as codecs and other popular desktop user software) and proper documentation for workstation users is also quite annoying. I also tried to get my video card to work properly, using my experience from Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch Linux, all of which worked fine without to much hassle. No matter what I tried on CentOS though, I kept getting this:
(II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering unstable on RV100, disabling
What? RV100 rendering has been stable for years. You got to be kinding me... Either way, I might just need to adjust to the Red Hat thing. And right now, even though CentOS isn't the best distro I ever used, working and annoying beats sexy and broken. I took the Ubuntu sticker of my laptop, too...