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A 5 star hangout for overworked and underpaid system admins.
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cuchumino
Posts: 19
Joined: 2014/12/06 02:44:32

Hello all!

Post by cuchumino » 2014/12/06 04:05:34

Hello everyone,

I'm Xavier. New to CentOS, currently coming out of a 11 year stint with Gentoo/Funtoo, 1 week with openSUSE, and now, after install and set up, hopefully a long time with CentOS. :)

I loved Gentoo, Moved to funtoo because I felt i was a bit more efficient, less of a hassle to install. The community was tight knit at funtoo, smaller than Gentoo, and I have to say, they all worked their asses off to find solutions to any problem. I learned a lot on a troubleshooting level.

Unfortunatley, as of the past year, there have been some issues that I tried to work around. Some were Linux-wide, others Gentoo specific, to the point where I rolled back to Funtoo stable in order to avoid the bugs/issues during compile and install of packages. But even stable had some issues I considered unacceptable for a stable OS. Mainly, some packages that were critical were not compiling well or playing nice. Also, every other system sync, I'd find a package that was broken or not working.

As mentioned, it was a smaller community than Gentoo, and they had a lot of work in front of them.

I then started to question the whole source distro philosophy, and if it was for me. There were moments when I was spending more time with distro specific problems, rather than getting work done. I came to the conclusion that I had learned A LOT but it was time to move on.

I wanted to move on to something that could be used on a server both in enterprise as well as for my personal use, AND also as a desktop. I'd like to possibly leverage knowing linux and translating that to some kind of industry certificate. I know a little bit about linux through my time with Gentoo/Funtoo, BUT... at this stage in my career, it would be nice to have some kind of certificate showing my penguin chops. :)

So I "shopped", compared, read, then copied some distro images that I had narrowed down to. openSUSE and CentOS.

I considered Debian, and I even installed it for an hour, but I didn't like the feel. I think it was using a dated Gnome version, and it was kind of tough to install. Deleting a partition to repurpose it for Debian was giving me a hard time during the guided installation, apparently kept on getting errors. Really wierd. I wasn't too convinced either since there weren't any certificates relevant to my current professional aspirations, so I dropped it almost immediately.

So then, I leaned towards openSUSE, mainly because the daily desktop/work portion was mostly ready right out of the box and seemed to be easier to set up.

This past week, I spent some time playing with openSUSE. I liked YaST, although I prefer using terminal for doing things, I liked that at least while I get acquainted with the OS, I had a GUI (training wheels). I also noticed that it was very flexible for whatever need I wanted it to be, whether it be desktop or server.

But alas, installing critical packages that resided in different repos was a problem. Documentation wasn't clear, installing a package meant possibly pulling from 2 other different repos that I hadn't even heard of. Although I got everything to work, I feared dependency hell further down the road. Not knowing which package comes from where, or why it came from there... and in turn if I had to roll back not knowing which packages to uninstall in what order, and which repos to uninstall in what order.... that didn't sit well in my stomach.

On openSUSE I probably had 10 different 3rd party repos after installing skype, monitoring-plugins (nagios-plugins) , and steam, and I had no clue as to the relationship between the 3rd party repos, and the official ones.

I initially had some reserve about this OS because I had heard it was an awesome, stable, server OS, that was derived from RHEL but mainly focused on servers. That it would take a bit of magic to get it to be a decent desktop system. That openSUSE was better in the sense that it was more flexible (desktop/server) and had a decent server footprint in the business world as well.

So I gave CentOS a spin, and I'm liking it so far. I was able to set up my laptop and my desktop quickly and relatively hiccup free, package repos are MUCH better explained here. I think I have 3 repos that I've had to add between skype, steam, and a newer kernel (for logitech wireless mouse support which was my only hiccup out of box). Those 3 repos, I read in the description that they don't overlap the official repos, which is SUPER important to know and would let me sleep at night. :)

So, I'm looking forward to continuing being on here. As I mentioned, I'd like to get out of CentOS some enterprise linux experience, get a super stable OS for my day to day desktop, install them on a demo network, and hopefully get involved in some way in the CentOS community once I get to know the OS a little bit better. It's all linux underneath!

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IanMcRV
Posts: 13
Joined: 2014/12/03 10:26:49

Re: Hello all!

Post by IanMcRV » 2014/12/06 20:49:34

Hi Xavier

cool name

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