On 6/14/2011 4:54 PM, Ron Blizzard wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:48 AM,m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Odd you should mention it - a friend on a techie mailing list just tried to set up dual-boot XP w/ ubuntu, and had all *kinds* of grief, dunno if she just restored XP. Wouldn't recognize her USB keyboard, didn't get the graphics card and monitor right (which does surprise me), and she had fun trying to find in which submenu the X settings were (applications, not system!).
My brother called this weekend. He's a Windows programmer who has recently started experimenting with Linux. Ubuntu, specifically. He upgraded and then his ATI video card quit working correctly. He finally found the solution, but he searched all day (I was no help to him). I have one partition set up with Linux Mint 10 (because my Dad uses Linux Mint and I want to be able to support him over the phone). Every time I boot up, Nautilus and Gnome-Panel don't come up. (I have to go to a terminal and type "pkill nautilus" and "pkill gnome-panel" to get them to work.) So, although Mint is "pretty" and uses modern packages, it's not rock solid like CentOS. Of course desktops are different than servers and I can only speak from personal (limited) experience.
How much modern hardware do you have running with CentOS in GUI mode? I think these are just generic Linux issues. The last round of servers we got (in a different office) wouldn't even show the CentOS installer screen well enough to fill in the network setup info. This was an IBM 3550 M3 with some sort of Matrox video on board. I'd expect that to be a fairly mainstream server box.
And by the way - if you need to run something yourself just to be able to support someone else you can usually do it under vmware player, virtualbox, etc. It's easier than fighting with real hardware and shutting down whatever else you were doing to use it.