title: Waiting for centosplus link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/waiting-for-centosplus/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 721 created: 2007/04/28 17:12:00 created_gmt: 2007/04/28 17:12:00 comment_status: open post_name: waiting-for-centosplus status: publish post_type: post

Waiting for centosplus

The old Dell laptop has been performing very well since being upgraded to CentOS 5. It’s still a pig on power consumption, or maybe it’s just that I made a huge mistake in getting it with the standard instead of the hi-capacity battery. I’ve been waiting for release of a centosplus kernel for 5 before upgrading my workstation at home, mostly because I need FireWire (IEEE1394) support to interface with the tape side of our minicam (a Sony). Supposedly the first issue of that kernel has been completed and should be available on the mirrors any day now.

It’s a mark of how spoiled I’ve become since switching to CentOS a couple of years ago. Back in the bad old days I would routinely spend hours rebuilding the stock kernel from source to get whatever additional device support I needed. Nowadays I wait for someone else to do it and just download their package. Another indicator is my irrational annoyance whenever I have to do an update on one of the Red Hat Enterprise boxes at work. With CentOS I can install a system and issue a “yum update” in relatively rapid succession. For the RHEL environment we need to first procure a subscription, which takes some time with our internal corporate bureaucracy, and then register the system after it’s installed. I can buy time by downloading and mounting the latest respin disks, but even with RHEL 4.4 there are by now a staggering number of packages needed to bring a system up to date — not the least of which is the latest tzdata covering the new DST (Daylight Savings Time) rules. RHEL 5 isn’t as bad, but as of the date I’m writing this there isn’t ANY commercial software certified to run on it — leastways nothing from any of the major ISV’s (Independant Software Vendors) we use (Oracle, CA, IBM, etc.).

So here I am, sitting out on the back porch typing this article in between visits to my favorite CentOS mirror.

Well, at least it’s a nice warm, sunny, afternoon in North Carolina.

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