Raiden's Realm: Review: CentOS 5.3

Review: CentOS 5.3 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Jun 24, 2009 at 11:56am
Section: Reviews
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CentOS is a "Community Enterprise OS", hence it's name. It's designed with the business user in mind, both on the desktop and in the server room. Since the last time we reviewed CentOS, it's under gone some changes, and seen a minor version upgrade to improve a number of features. But even minor versions can have some much needed improvements. So let's have a look at what the newer CentOS has to offer.

Install

Since CentOS has no LiveCD, once you boot the cd, you're immediately tossed into the installer, either via the text installer, or the graphical one. You can choose either from the boot screen. Once that's done, you'll be asked to check the cd for defects. I usually recommend it so as to save yourself the chance of headaches later on.

Once that's completed, the disk loads Anaconda, the installer system for CentOS. The initial welcome page greets you with an option to either read the release notes, or start the install. If you want to read the release notes without having to run the installer, just go here and read them in their wiki.

The next several steps are pretty easy. Just select your language, keyboard type, and whether you're upgrading or installing fresh. For this review I'm going to be doing a fresh install. On the next screen I choose to go with the default setup, which more or less removes all existing partitions, then reslices everything for CentOS to use.

The next couple of screens you can more or less just click through. The only one where you should need to add data is the root password. The next screen after that asks how you would like the desktop to be setup. You have your choice of Gnome, KDE, a pure server (IE, no gui), a server with a GUI, a clustering server, or one for storage clustering.

By default, Gnome is chosen. I on the other hand took both desktops just to see how it would be, especially since this is designed for enterprise use and I'm looking at it's use purely from the desktop aspect. A few more clicks and you're ready to install. There is an option to install extras while choosing the type of configuration you want, but I feel more comfortable letting the regular package manager handle that.

Typically the install takes about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the type of machine you have setup, and how much needs to be installed. Once that's done you can reboot. Overall the whole install process is very easy to do and hugely newbie friendly. So it'll be easy for pretty much anyone to do, which is good.

Overview

Bootups, both first and all others following it, is rather slow. I was disappointed on how long it took to get to the desktop. I'm not sure what all it's doing during bootup, but I think it could use a little sprucing up.

First boot will land you on a configuration page that leads you through setup of several things. The first is the firewall. That's on by default, and it's up to you to choose whether to leave it on or not, and if you do, which services you want to allow through by default. This won't affect later configurations, but will affect what services are allowed at first.

The next screen asks what setting you would like to configure SELinux at. SELinux is a set of controls that provide a much greater level of control over your system security than does traditional Linux. So if this is a server, or you're on a desktop that needs an extra level of security, this is best to have put all the way up on the �enforcing� setting. If not, then �permissive� or �disabled� may suit you better.

Next you're asked to set the date and time, setup users, configure the sound card, and setup additional cd's worth of stuff. For the vast majority of people, just clicking next through here is more than enough. Once that's done, just click finish and you'll be dropped into the login screen.

So far everything's been by the book and it's been pretty much an uneventful experience configuring and setting up CentOS, which is excellent for new users, and for corporate users as well. I can guarantee that there's a lot of IT guys that would love how easy this is to setup.

After logging in you will be dropped into your default desktop. This can be either Gnome or KDE, depending on which desktop you chose. If you chose both, it'll default into Gnome first. This can be changed from the session menu if you want.

A first run through Gnome shows a reasonable selection of software, much of which is good for getting started with basic productivity work. The humorous part is the size of the �games� section. It's almost as if the developers expect that part of your work day will be consumed playing games to pass the time.

As far as the software selection, most of the most popular software standbys are there, such as Firefox, Gimp, Open Office and others. It's not an overwhelming selection, but there is still a nice list of applications included. Certainly enough to get you started.

The software package system, which is Yum based, got a nice upgrade as well. I still prefer Apt, but this has some nice new features to help improve software installation. The graphical package system, again not as good as Synaptic, is still pretty good and keeps things simple for anyone wanting to install more applications.

As far as system performance, it was alright. Nothing grandly special, but it certainly left room for improvement. (there was a lot of HD activity for some reason!) Then I switched over to KDE to see how that did, and I found a marked improvement in performance and speed. (I'm not just saying that because I prefer KDE. It really was faster under KDE than Gnome!)

CentOS uses a fairly basic KDE 3.5 interface with some nice configurations, but nothing fancy. In fact, aside from the minor lag issues under Gnome, both performed exceptionally well. As far as total applications however, KDE beats Gnome on CentOS by miles. And the menu isn't filled with junk either. Even if you couldn't use every application available, someone can, so it's a perfect combination of applications.

Usability wise, I see absolutely no issues with CentOS. Well, save for the lag issue in Gnome. Everything loaded fine, ran fine, and was rock solid stable. And just for grins and giggles I tried to crash CentOS, and couldn't. I couldn't even get it to flake out, which is good.

For those wanting eyecandy like Compiz, there's none installed by default, but it is available from the repositories. I wouldn't recommend using it though, but you can if you want.

Conclusion

Overall I'm highly impressed with CentOS 5.3! I really feel it's an improvement over 5.0 and does just enough to reach that tipping point where I feel it is both corporate IT ready, as well as newbie friendly. So pretty much anyone can use it if they want.

I dislike the idea that there's no LiveCD available, which makes testing driving this distro a bit difficult, but I guess that since its primary intended use is in the corporate environment, any deployments would already have undergone significant testing by the IT department, making such LiveCD's unnecessary.

So if you're a business owner, or even just joe average, CentOS 5.3 will be a good choice for you. Just be sure you want to make the leap before actually doing it since there's no safety net like in other distros. It's all or nothing.

EDIT: Thanks to one of our forum members (Cutback), I've learned that there really is a livecd for CentOS. Oddly though, it's offered as a separate download, and not mentioned anywhere that I could find via the CentOS homepage. Ah, well. At least we know it has one now.

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