Hi All,
I'm from Victoria, BC and I'm definitely a newbie compared to my colleagues in the office but I still love Linux. I've dabbled in Linux for a few years now (Suse, Mepis, YellowDog, etc) but I switched jobs 1.5 years ago and got dunked into the deep end of it. We have a CentOS 5.1 server & a couple of CentOS desktops which I help look after - although I'm generally considered the "Windows Guy"....Linux is still a main part of my job as the Desktop Systems Admin. I just switched to Fedora Core 10 as I found CentOS 5.2 was holding me back - i.e didn't have some of the libraries or tools needed or they were too outdated.
So although I've been working in this environment full time for over a year now, I still consider myself way behind the eight ball when it comes to getting things done.....but half the fun is in the learning right? I expect to be picking up tips from a lot of my fellow noobs here.
Cheers,
CdnTech.
Well, you're in the right place!
Bear in mind that CentOS is the enthusiast version of RHEL, so expect some things to be a bit behind in the interests of stability - Fedora is deffo more modern and cutting-edge but it's more of a home/experimental version. Similarly, you may find that CentOS will lack some of the niceties that people expect of a desktop system (such as codecs and media players).
My FC4 boxen is currently borked (tried to do an update, it can't decide if it's Fed5 or FC4) and I'm making preparations to move it to CentOS at some point. I'm more familiar with RPM-based systems so will use it over something like Ubuntu - although my recent experiences of bunny8.10 have been quite positive.
Dabbling is tha way to go - enjoy, hoser!
Dungeon-Dave,
Thanks for the reply. Ya I'm aware that CentOS is based upon RHEL.......but the frustration I had of not being able to upgrade my Evolution without adding numerous other libraries (which probably would have messed up other apps ) was the turning point. One of my colleagues was running FC 10 which just seemed like the way to go. I probably would have tried Mepis again, or even Linux_XP but without knowing what "traps" may lay ahead I could not justify that risk of having an unstable Desktop. Besides with somebody else running the same distro, I'll have a knowledge resource close by.
When my users are clamoring for tasks to be accomplished I cannot afford to be without a reliable linux box.....and I don't really want to rely on my Windows machine for some of my administrative duties. :) I'll try those other distros out within the safety of a virtual machine (Virtual Box) where I can mess around with them to my heart's content.
Cheers.
just a fyi, linux-noob.com is running on Centos 5.3, i would have run it on fedora (as I did for years) but... the hosting company preinstalled centos..
i like it as an os though, felt straight at home because its yum and rpm based,
welcome to the forums !
cheers
anyweb
Thanks for the welcome anyweb!
I agree that CentOS is a good distro - we are using it for our Samba file server....and it works great for this purpose. I also like the familiarity of using yum, it just didn't suit my purposes as a Desktop for doing my daily tasks. Adding software from some of the unprotected repos would have negating the stability it provided so it just seemed necessary to migrate to something more modern.
Cheers,
cdntech