Hi,
I'm a 40-year old sysadmin living in Montpezat, a small village in the sunny south of France. I'm a Linux user since 2001, when I made my first steps on a 486 with a Slackware 7.1 CD. I've tried maybe two dozen distributions, but I've stayed mostly with Slackware and Debian.
Since last summer, I work as a sysadmin for our "Communauté de Communes", a group of 16 villages, where I care for computers and installs of town halls and public libraries. I've configured a LAMP server in a datacenter, running Debian Sarge, and all clients in town halls and libraries are running Debian Etch, a highly stripped-down and personalized GNOME desktop with just a handful of apps needed for work.
I've fiddled with CentOS before, around when 4.3 came out, and it was a close second in the choice of OS here. Had 5.0 been out at the time, I would gladly have chosen it. I've discussed the subject with Daniel de Kok, a fellow ex-Slacker and friend, and he's told me so many good things about the latest release of CentOS that I'm now seriously considering replacing my Debian installs with CentOS.
I have an armada of PCs that i can fiddle with, and I've currently installed two different versions of CentOS, one as minimal as I could, one with a default GNOME desktop. On my personal laptop I have the Red Hat Deployment Guide, as well as some more CentOS-specific docs. I have a list of 40 or so items that I will have to take care of in the following days or weeks, maybe months: "minimal install?", "yum?", "configure wireless rt2500, rt61, ipw3945?", "find extra repos for multimedia stuff?", etcetera. I just went to take a peek at IRC, and "Arrfab" told me the main communication channel for CentOS was this mailing list.
Cheers from France,
Niki Kovacs