title: CentOS 5: Just as good as new link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/centos-5-just-as-good-as-new/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 603 created: 2007/11/22 15:57:46 created_gmt: 2007/11/22 15:57:46 comment_status: open post_name: centos-5-just-as-good-as-new status: publish post_type: post

CentOS 5: Just as good as new

Finally completed the rebuild of my primary desktop server at home as a new CentOS 5 server last night.

Because this box doubles as the primary server for the house, providing our core DHCP, DNS, LDAP, NTP, home page and web proxy (squidguard), I had to do the work in two stages. The first started around 23:00 local time, with a backup of anything that was going to get overwritten, like /etc, /home, /var and /opt. I then did a fresh install on my /boot and / partitons. I ran a yum update to get everything up to date. Finally, I went in and configued all my core services using the data in /etc and /var. This took me to around 03:00 the next morning, when I finally went down to get some sleep.

All that work paid off though, because the family didn’t notice anything had changed — which is about as good as it gets for any professional sysadmin. When my wife asked why I was up so late I just smiled.

I had taken the next day off, so I then picked up with stage two: getting the desktop side of the box in shape.

Because everyone was home, this work got done in bursts when I was free to take it up. I set up my yum repository settings first, for the first time adding the ProtectBase and Prorities plugins as recommended in the CentOS Wiki to help alleviate some of the major headaches that come with using multiple 3rd part repositories in additon to those provided by CentOS. I also added the new Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repo hosted by Red Hat. To avoid library conflicts I’ve given RPMForge priority because it has the majority of the packages I use.

Because my display using the generic X11 driver was really annoying me by this point, I went out and grabbed Dag’s repackaging of the proprietary nVidia driver for my card (an nVidia 6200TC) and edited xorg.conf so that it was free from any special module load statements (e.g. Load glx). This lets xorg configure on the fly and is the best way I’ve found of getting everything working correctly. Using a real rpm for this makes it alot easier to get things working the next time a new kernel comes along.

After that I installed Sun Java from my archives (v1.5.0_11) and configured it to replace the shipping system Java.

Then it was on to installing the usual group of 3rd party stuff: Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash, Real Player — All from the vendor’s own rpms (using the rpm --relocate switch where necessary to make them install to /opt).

As for a general purpose media player that can read other proprietary formats, I’ve decided to use the VideoLAN Client instead of anything xine or mplayer based. Over the years I’ve found both the latter wanting in ease of use and stability. VideoLAN, in contrast, not only has a terrific UI but continues to be very stable.

All in all the whole experience of returning to CentOS has been a fairly pleasant one. If I get some time over this long weekend I may take a shot at rebuilding the house laptop as well, although that will depend on whether I can get some free time on it.

Update: I recently switch from vlc to xine due to a cascade of library issues that came with recent updates to RHEL/CentOS 5. While I still prefer the former, there comes a time every so often that you just get tired of spitting in the wind.

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