[CALUG] CentOS compat with Fedora ???

[Walt Smith]

Thanks to those who replied offlist
and onlist.  It seems one big advantage
Fedora has is the huge number of precompiled packages
that simply install.  While I haven't tried many other
distros ( recently ), my impression is Ubuntu would be the next 
most prolific distro. 

I'm almost tempted to wait til Fedora 18 to wait
until more of those pesky gnome bugs are worked out,
(admittedly w/ hardware that is older and not g3 compat).
But doing an initial KDE install might be an option.
One prior complaint was there was no gui dialer in gnome
Network Manager. ( it was removed, thats crazy  !!! ), But there
is a kppp dialer.  (and for CLI users, I'd really hate to go
recreate my wvdialer config file I used years earlier....)
But I digress !!

I installed for trial CentoOS 6.2 from a DVD.
( any OS is easily removable at this point ).
( Have NOT put it to use though )... it also seems
to have a kppp dialer... no dialer in Network Manager.
While a relatively recent release at around Dec 2011, 
I was surprised to see a 2.6 kernel and a FF 3.6.
( update archives seem to show an FF 10 available for it ).

The older 2.6 kernel has a BIG advantage:
It booted on two boxes that Fedora 16 would not.
( without screwing with some kernel param) !!
Again, I suggest that install kernels on DVD's always
to configged to the lowest damn denominator so they
WILL boot !!  I don't know when having the NEWEST
hardware to use linux became a requirement.

More to the point:

I did not know about EPEL, mentioned in Cottrell's mail
below.  Googling and following several links lead to
interesting cocktails:

http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

http://centos.karan.org/   ( only CentOS 4 and 5 )

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/repoview/

The last includes the Electronic lab as well as MANY
others.  Will look over and putz around.


thx to all !!


Walt.....

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:03:07 -0400
From: James Ewing Cottrell 3rd <JECottrell3 at Comcast.NET>
Subject: Re: [CALUG] CentOS compat with Fedora ???
To: calug at unknownlamer.org
Message-ID: <4FDAA5EB.7070205 at Comcast.NET>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

What you want is called EPEL: Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux.

Loosely speaking: Fedora = RHEL + EPEL

You can drop in the EPEL Repository to RHEL, CentOS, or Scientific (and
possibly even SUSE or Mandrake) and get Ruby Gems, GIT, Cobbler, and
Various Other Cool Stuff.

JIM


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There's a shortage of programmers for that language created this morning.