Saving dollars with CentOS

At the Austin BarCamp in March, I found myself sitting next to a guy with a large new laptop that seemed to be running some kind of Linux. Turned out his name was Matt Lawrence, his laptop was a new Dell Inspiron 9300, his job was systems administration and his Linux of choice was CentOS.

I asked him about it. Here are my notes, all quotes:

CentOS's goal is to be as close to Red Hat as possible without violating trademarks and copyrights. They lag behind Red Hat Enterprise four by two or three weeks. All the security and other updates are constantly coming out.

If you want support fom a person, buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you want suppport form a comjunity with the same code base, get CentOS.

They fit nicely together. You can run Red Hat Enterprise for production and run CentOS for develompent and testing.

It's my preferred desktop. And I'd say it's an excellent desktop system choice for small companies. Getting it up and running on this new Dell was easy. It came right up, ready to go. The only glitch was X. I had to edit the X config file for screen, which is 1920 by 1200. That's 16 by 9 rather than 4 by 3.

So I got the minimum up off one CD, then aded the packages I wanted. That took about an hour to pull those down over DSL using yum.

It's a good deal. I get paid for doing Red Hat. And I save my own money running CentOS.

We'd appreciate hearing about your experience with CentOS as well.

- Doc Searls

Note: this and other pictures of Matt are here, and adjacent to here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/111212776/in/set-72057594079930437/

There is a link for "all sizes" above each picture. Among those are the 5 megapixel originals.

Source:

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