[CentOS] 5.3 on an EeePC??
Warren Young
warren at etr-usa.com
Wed Apr 29 11:30:29 UTC 2009
Beartooth wrote:
>> Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ?
>
> I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm
> family
Me, too, and it's rational in my case. I've experienced the whole range
of both sets of tools, from the ground up. RPMs are simpler to build
than DEBs, and an rpm/yum-based system is easier to maintain than a
dpkg/apt-based one, considering just packaging issues. It's true that I
have many more years experience with RPM based systems, but I've been
using Ubuntu now for about a year and a half, and my opinion isn't
shifting much any more.
I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is
came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point
to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from
the net directly from the command line?" Sure, once upon a time it was,
but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is
that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit.
(There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that
the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.)
But, enough of the advocacy rant. Though I use CentOS far more often
than I do Ubuntu, there are a few places where Ubuntu simply works
better. One of those places is on my Eee 1000. Take it from an RPM
fan: it's a poor reason to prefer CentOS for your netbook, unless your
goal is to feed patches back to Red Hat for future versions of the OS.
> speed of boot becomes a major criterion.
Ubuntu 9.04 greatly improved the boot speed relative to previous
versions of the OS.
Separate from that effort, but speeding disk-heavy activities like
booting still further, Ubuntu 9.04 also includes ext4 support. You have
to partition manually to enable it, but I recommend that for netbooks
anyway because that's also the only way to avoid having a swap
partition. Swapping to flash is loony.
Between these improvements and a few tweaks to the automatic service
startup list, my 1000 goes from the BIOS screen to a desktop in under a
minute. I'm running the netbook remix version.
Ubuntu 9.04 supports the Eee's power management features, too, so you
can sleep it and wake it back up reasonably quickly.
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