On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 01:19:25PM +0100, Parshwa Murdia wrote:

Hi,

I am having some basic queries which are as follows:

1. I am having the PC and already installed is Fedora Core 11 as well as

Windows XP (dual boot). Fedora has unstability because of its EOL. If I want to install the Cent OS for home PC (personal), should the installation CD (after getting it burned) would prompt me to replace the existing Linux (i.e. Fedora) or would it try to install into the whole of the memory? My requirement is to only replace the existing Fedora Core 11 but to make the Windows remain intact.

It should give the same option that you see in Fedora, remove existing Linux distribution. There is also an option for custom partitioning. The default, if I remember correctly, is to remove existing Linux and replace it.

2. Though I am new in Linux, and even Fedora commands I don't know much but

majority of the commands in Cent OS and Fedora are same?

Yes. As far as command line goes, aside from package management, (RedHat based distributions, including Fedora and CentOS, use yum, Debian and Ubuntu based distributions use apt, ArchLinux uses pacman, and so on) the rest of the commands are going to be the same.

(Or at least extremely similar--sometimes, a distribution has version x of a program and another distribution has version y--and version y might have a few different options.)

If you are using the default Gnome desktop, sometimes the layout is slightly different so using the menu may have some slight differences---for example, RedHat and Fedora put the terminal under system tools, whereas Ubuntu (and oddly enough, Oracle Linux) put it under accessories.

3. What Cent OS should I download and install? I mean for a single PC at

home, can I install the server CentOS or simple CentOS?

There is no server/workstation version. It's all one version and you can customize during installation, which is the same as Fedora.

I hope that Cent OS would be good to use at home.

The only issues you may run into are that, as the price of stability, there are often older versions of packages--this can sometimes mean that a later version of a program isn't available, because it requires newer glibc versions, and, at times, hardware support from later kernels isn't available.

However, due to many 3rd party efforts, such as elrepo, one can find the support for some newer piece of hardware. It sometimes requires more research than would be necessary for one of the more desktop oriented distributions, such as Fedora.