Comments on: CentOS 5 as a Desktop System

By: Anonymouse

Anonymouse — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:29:11 +0000

Yes - this release is heavier than RHEL4.

I am very used to the feel of RHEL4 and can definitely tell the difference. Nautilus is hogging 10% of the CPU.

With 1GB RAM and doing a copy/transfer from a USB drive and nothing but defaults (no “servers”) I have 6216k free memory. 96k of swap is used.

As a server person I wonder why Linux aims for the Desktop so much. No one who pays wants it for that, they don’t care. They want solid, lean mean servers.

Want a great Desktop and Unix? Get a mac. Really. Want a great server… well, I hope I can keep using Linux for that but the are about to lose that ground too it seems.

By: geekyone

geekyone — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:40:55 +0000

As I said in a comment further up, I’m currently on a CentOS 5.2 desktop system. Runs great. I love it.
Wish you had done a more in depth review though, I would have liked to read it.
I have to say though, you’re lucky that the system doesn’t come with flash plugins for Firefox. That is what has been giving me the most trouble of anything. Both the Flash plugin distributed by Flash and third party one I found have some sort of problem in their code. Either will occasionally just go haywire and I’ll have to kill it. It’s a pain.
For a professional level desktop, it’s great. Extremely stable, as long as you use the priorities plugin if you add any add-on repositories to yum. Use it with KDE, and it’s the perfect desktop for an admin in my oppinion. I got apache running with perl, php, and mysql, and can run any scripts for testing. Can load up my servers on the desktop because of KDE. Can leave it on for days. Yum will always keep it up to date. It’s great.

By: geekyone

geekyone — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:21:01 +0000

Funny, it seemed to beat out gentoo for business desktops.

I think it depends on what you use it for. I installed CentOS 5.2 recently on one of my systems at home to become more familiar with it for script development of custom sites. I’m using it right now actually, because it’s actually easier for me to use than many other systems I’ve messed with. Though it is of note that it is a little bloated on first install. Took me a single day to configure the majority of the system, and after that, I’ve had very few problems. Primary problem was mentioned in this article, not coming with certain codecs. If you get the right repos though, you can solve that with a little yummy pain.

I’ve had few systems install easier. At least after you got the system installed you can look up any further problems on the web. Most other distros I’ve worked with gave me some pain or another during install.

By: strompf

strompf — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:52:38 +0000

Thank you! What a relieve!

By: linuxamp

linuxamp — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:40:09 +0000

I know CentOS is built from RHEL but RHEL has several editions and CentOS only has one. How does this compare to the actual RHEL desktop product?
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/desktop/

By: michuk

michuk — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:10:40 +0000

manmath sahu: please stop spamming about PCLinuxOS in your comments!

By: manmath sahu

manmath sahu — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:16:14 +0000

Good review! CentOS is good enterprise desktop, but never a good home desktop. PCLinuxOS is a damn good home desktop. Visit Tweaking PCLinuxOS.

By: Fun Game Videos

Fun Game Videos — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:19:57 +0000

Just installed CentOS 5.0 on my DELL server (AMD cpu) and got a lot of errors… Aparently, CentOS5 installs Intel guts by default and I did not find where to change it during setup… I just removed CentOS 5.0 and switched back to CentOS 4.5

In my opinion 5.0 is A LOT heavier and slow then 4.5, unless I really cut all the meat off it…