Well, I got sick of the fe­do­ra up­grade tread­mil­l.

Al­though I have a num­ber of things help­ing me in the soft­ware man­age­ment fron­t, hav­ing to up­grade the OS in all my cus­tomers ev­ery 18 months or so is just bor­ing.

Since they don't need cut­ting edge soft­ware at al­l, it just was­n't worth it. Be­ing a cheap guy, switch­ing to Nov­ell or RHEL was not worth it, ei­ther.

So, I checked Cen­tOS 4. A nice bor­ing stodgy RHEL repack­ag­ing. I have been us­ing it in se­lect­ed en­vi­ron­ments (in­clud­ing my home box) for a co0u­ple of week­s.

It's re­al­ly not ter­ri­ble.

Ok, the de­fault ker­nel it ships is ter­ri­ble. Al­most no pe­riph­er­als work with it, and hot­plug is bro­ken like all hel­l, but I just got atrp­m's FC3 ker­nel and all is fine.

The oth­er main prob­lems are:

• There are not enough pack­­age sources yet

• I can't find a de­­cent APT for it. So I am us­ing YUM.

Well, YUM re­al­ly hurts it.

• For some rea­­son, I can't re­­move soft­­ware when I am of­f­­line. It hangs.

• It's sloooooooow. Damn slow. In­­­cred­i­bly slow. Makes APT look fast slow! Af­ter I added a few ex­­tra re­­pos, it takes about 3 min­utes for "yum search pyxm­l"

But hey, it's not all that bad if you have the time. And for the re­al work, my box­es use cus­tom-­pack­aged stuff any­way. I just need­ed some­thing that was­n't go­ing to bite me lat­er.

And since I am read­just­ing my life to spend more time at home, I do have the time.

On oth­er news, I had to re­in­stall PyD­S, of course. So, I de­cid­ed to treat my own box the same way I treat my clients' and for­bid my­self from in­stalling non-­pack­aged soft­ware.

So, I pack­aged it. Mind you, that's on an ar­gen­tini­an ca­ble­modem, so don't ex­pect any kind of speed. And it won't be there for long.

Any re­quired pack­ages not in that place are avail­able in the dis­tro, or in dag or in karan