Goodbye Fedora and hello Centos?

[dries]

Quoting Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com>:

> 
>     I was unable to resolve my problems in reading DVD drives in
> Fedora 
> 4. So, I decided to switch to another distribution. I saw on one site
> 
> that the three distros being nominated for best distribution by
> user's 
> vote were Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora Core. I tried Ubuntu, but the 
> installer kept failing. So I went to CentOS.
>     Anyway, long story short, CentOS looks and feels just like
> Fedora, 
> and it reads all my DVD drives normally, so I think I could be happy
> 
> with it.
>     But...
>     When I tried to install Xine, using yum, it said it could not
> find 
> it. And then I went looking for an RPM for Xine, and they're all for
> Red 
> Hat or Fedora. I tried installing an RPM for Fedora anyway, reasoning
> 
> that maybe they were the same in more than just looks, but no dice.
>     As I looked around the net, it seems that applications all seem
> to 
> have specific builds for Red Hat, Fedora, a couple of Debian
> builds... 
> but no CentOS. Going by the amount of available information and
> support, 
> Fedora is the primary Linux distribution, and CentOS hardly even
> exists.
>     Can't I have it all? Stability, the ability to read my DVD
> drives, 
> *and* a variety of applications?
>     Further, why is everything being built for Fedora if it's some
> kind 
> of experimental build not ideal for consumer use (as was explained to
> me 
> on this very list)?
> 
>     What's the deal here?

In short: you need to add the apt/smart/yum/.. lines of rpm repositories
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because CentOS is compatible with RHEL.

The normal binary version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux can't be
downloaded freely but the source rpms are available because it's all
open source. CentOS is made of these source rpms, so it's almost exactly
the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So rpms for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux work very well on CentOS. Of course some source rpms are changed
to remove the trademarks of Red Hat and you don't have support from Red
Hat anymore. 

kind regards,
Dries


--
Rpm packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core and Aurora at
http://dries.ulyssis.org/rpm/