Centos 6.3 has been available on the mirrors for around a week -which means the Centos devs have managed to push out two point releases of thei re-compiled RHEL6.x just weeks after Red Hat themselves released the ‘real deal’ upstream. Given it took them something like nine months to replicate RHEL6.0 and many months to achieve a 6.1, their good form on the 6.2 and 6.3 tracks looks reassuring.
So much so that I’ve re-installed it as my primary desktop (though only as a dual boot with Windows, given that I’m forced to use Windows at work).
There is absolutely nothing about RHEL6.3/Centos6.3 which is particularly exciting from my point of view. The big plusses are that it ships with LibreOffice by default, not OpenOffice; Firefox 10.x, not ye ancient 3.6; and Oracle 11.2 installs on it perfectly (a Gladstone update will follow shortly)
The big thumbs-downers are: Stellarium still doesn’t work properly on my rig when installed via yum: you still have to go the self-compile route. Twin monitors work by default, but the in-built config tool doesn’t let you choose which one is the main monitor (I like mine to be the right-hand one, which isn’t allowed). To get that sort of control, you still have to download NVidia’s proprietary drivers. And, perhaps more surprisingly, I couldn’t get Rhythmbox to play my FLAC files by default (the Movie Player application did, but not the default audio application… go figure!).
Other than those little niggles (all of which can be worked around), it’s a nice, stable, slightly boring, Gnome 2 (Thank God!) desktop that I like a lot.
Hi HJR!
I thought you were a CentOS deserter to something more ‘glamorous’ like this Scientific Linux!
Cheers.
Carlos.
I wouldn’t call SL more “glamorous”, exactly! Just that for a long while, it was more on-time than Centos… a failure on Centos’ part which appears now to have been rectified, twice in a row. Anyway… for now, Centos is newer and shinier than SL. And shiny is glamorous, I guess! :0
Regards
HJR
Howard,
I was CentOS user for many years, but nowadays, I can’t find a good reason why Oracle professional would deploy Oracle on CentOS 6.3 rather than OEL 6.3, for example? Is it because of what Oracle is doing with UEK? Otherwise, OEL appears to me as free as CentOS since the day when Oracle decided to enhance their public yum server with bug and security fixes free of charge. I know that you “dislike” OEL for your own use for some reason, but knowing how passionate OS destroyer you’re
, I know it must be something specific reason. If someone asked you today to setup OID as you did it at your previous workplace, would you still prefer CentOS over OEL?
Regards,
Ales
Good question.
1. Generally, if I was at work, I would not use Centos, because it’s not supported. The OID installation you refer to was at work and was in “production”… but only the developers relied on the centralised name resolution service it provided. Servers talked to other servers (for database links, etc) using ye olde tnsnames. So the OID box was not truly “production”, certainly not critically so, though the developers wouldn’t have thought that way. Besides, previous workplace was quite small and thus pretty relaxed about this sort of thing! I wouldn’t dream of it these days, put it that way!
2. Centos got used because I hadn’t, at that point, persuaded the business to switch to Linux from Windows, so there were no proper licenses (Red Hat, Oracle etc) to run OID on. The only way I was ever going to get OID in was to do it for free… and that meant Centos. If I was putting OID in to a business that was properly O/S licensed, I wouldn’t use Centos, simply because of the lack of support.
3. In any choice between real Red Hat and OEL in a real workplace, I’d choose Red Hat (usually). I did at one point purchase 6 OEL licenses and had a hell of a time getting them activated in time (it was a bit of an emergency). After being given the runaround by a completely useless support service and then being told it would take several hours to a day before the systems could be registered and updated, I got online with Red Hat and a credit card and had 6 functional and updated O/S installs about 2 hours later. I realise that’s just a one-off experience in particular circumstances, but I liked dealing with Red Hat, and I was still having to deal with Oracle 12 months later trying to get them to realise we’d cancelled that particular order and thus didn’t need to pay their invoices for continued support.
4. I don’t find the Oracle-tweaked kernel compelling, generally, and I have found Oracle’s support to be useless and Red Hat’s to be quite good. In addition, I have vague, “moral” objections (I suppose you’d call them) to Oracle essentially forking Red Hat and then making their fork incompatible with Red Hat. Yup, I realise they offer their tweaks back up-stream, but I can’t help but feel it’s like a mugger handing me back my wallet whilst making off with my laptop. The Oracle kernel might be excellent for running Oracle databases, but I dislike the way it was arrived at.
5. In any choice between Centos/Red Hat/SL/OEL for home-learning purposes, I’d choose Centos or SL, because Red Hat isn’t cheap, and Oracle doesn’t have the repositories. For example, it’s possible to get downloads and updates for Centos and SL from mirror.aarnet.edu.au… which happens to be an unmetered download for me with my Bigpond ISP. Unmetered downloads are important when you’re stuck in the middle of the bush with a very tight (<15GB) monthly download limit. It’s not that I “dislike OEL”: it’s simply less convenient (for me with my particular ISP, I realise).
Hi Howard,
I was “off-line” for a few day…so a bit late reply: I wish to thank you for this in-depth explanation. I completely forgot about your “ordeal” with the broadband available to you (I don’t have better broadband at home, however my workplace is download heaven;). Never had any contact with RH support, but did with Oracle and I’m not surprised about your experience. With all kind of acquisition taking place almost on a monthly basis it’s not surprising that Oracle support and logistic is not keeping up with the task. RH is in much better shape on this front, for sure. Have a nice day!
Regards,
Ales
Question for you guys.
Sorry i’m a noob with Linux, im just trying to teach myself about Linux and the dif types out there for consumer use. anyhow i am working with centos 6.3 and installing different types of servers and playing with them on a dual core e6600 with 8 gigs of ram. i’m using the how to forge installs to learn about what can and can not be installed. but my question is this! what type of Linux os would you suggest for me to use to set up a production web server as i would like to host my site out of my home. my isp gives me a 150 mb line so i might as well use it for something other than gaming.
Centos 6.3 with Apache would do very well. I would choose that over something like Ubuntu Server, anyway -but Linux+Apache is pretty standard fare no matter what distro you settle for. If you’re already using Centos 6.3, though, I see no reason to change.