- Why does the screen flicker on and off several times during boot and
when logging in?
I presume you mean when logging in at the console, the fonts look a bit glitchy and flickery at times. I can't recall the exact details, but this is a known RHEL5 bug, caused by the system reloading the fonts every time a character or line of characters is displayed. There was one complicated workaround posted, but for now, this cannot be resolved. I don't see it now, in any case, since I login via ssh and dont need to be at the console.
- When I chose a pure console environment, without any X11 stuff, why
did a bunch of gnome packages get installed?
As strange as it may seem, some apps which are supposedly text-only, have dependencies based on the gnome libs. I can't remember the offending packages offhand, but I don't really care much since disk-space is so cheap.
- Is it possible to get a php-mssql package? -I need this if I'm going
to use CentOS at work..
There is no default rpm for centos5, but one exists for Fedora.