Good morning, everyone...
Perhaps this will either help or encourage others interested in using CentOS as a networked workstation. It is based upon my experiences, and all other disclaimers apply.
1. I did a basic workstation install from 4.1 CD's deploying KDE and Gnome desktops and, other than a few minor issues, mostly of my making, everything went smoothly. The install process is excellent, fairly cogent and straightforward.
2. I have used the Rekall database development application with MySQL for nearly a year under various permutations of Linux, most notably Debian and Mandriva. Since it is not delivered with CentOS, I was forced to locate and download the source. I also downloaded and compiled the xbase and xbsql (auxiliary utilities for Xbase) packages with no problems encountered, whatsoever.
3. Another favored application, the Pan Newsreader, has a dependency, the gnet libraries, which I found as a RedHat RPM, on rpmfind.net. Then I simply downloaded the latest Pan build, which has a number of bug fixes in BETA, and installed it from RPM. If you are going to use the latest Pan builds, you will need gnet >=2.04.
[Glitches encountered]
1. I have not had the time to RTFM about XSane and its wicked permissions, yet. For the moment, however, I am resorting to firing off XSane as the super-user, since it will not work otherwise. I know it's in the manuals, I just haven't had the time to read the manuals that much, yet. ;-)
2. Of course, as nearly always is the case, regardless of which platform I've been using, I had to manually install the Java runtime and create a link for it in my Firefox configuration. It's not really a glitch; more like it is a fact of life.
3. KDE's kdetoys doesn't apparently come with CentOS. However, that is a project for yet another day, when I have time to truly explore it further. I probably will have to install it from source if I want the weather in my task bar. <sigh> I tried to install it from source, and there are errors from the source. Oh, well.
Life goes on.
Dave