[CentOS] KDE as default, and looking up CentOS on the web.

Tue Aug 2 03:01:47 UTC 2005
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 10:47 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> >
> >
> >Dave ... there is no relationship between centos and rh ... 
> >
> Sorry, that was poor wording. I didn't mean a relationship in terms of 
> any official partnership between the creators. I meant a relationship in 
> the sense that they share a lot of the same features and design. I mean, 
> I don't know what RHE looks like, but I know that Fedora and CentOS look 
> exactly alike, as far as my newbie eyes can tell.

They look the same ... and they are very similar (FC3 and CentOS-4) ...
but RHEL-4 and CentOS-4 are much more similar.  In fact, only 27 of 803
SRPMS have any changes at all between the two ... that is 3.4%  Almost
all the changes are trademark / logo related.

See the release notes for any changes that are not logo/trademark
related:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/RELEASE-NOTES-en.html

> 
> But really, it's not so much how Red Hat and CentOS connect or don't 
> connect that I'm wondering about. It's more about the community of 
> support for CentOS. I've been pretty impressed with the helpfulness of 
> this list, and I don't feel I'm lacking support. I just feel like when I 
> search the net for relatively obvious questions about CentOS, unless 
> it's on the centOS web site, there's nothing out there. So I keep coming 
> to this list with rock bottom basics.
> 
> Let me qualify further. I know that probably a lot of issues I'm likely 
> to ask about are more Linux specific than CentOS specific. And I also 
> know that so long as I'm reading information about some kind of Red Hat 
> build, it probably applies to CentOS. And I also know that most issues 
> are to do with the applications rather than the OS.
> But as a newbie, I'm always nervous that if I take information about a 
> Linux command from some Linux infortmation web site and apply it on my 
> system, it will turn out as often as not that things don't work exactly 
> as the web site says, because there's some setting somewhere that makes 
> CentOS just a little different from what the web site says.
> It's really comforting when trying to look up information on the net to 
> see the information provided in a context that is as close to your own 
> as possible. Fedora seems to have lots of people saying they run it and 
> here's what they did to configure whatever it was they wanted to 
> configure. CentOS... not so much.
> Is it really just that CentOS is so new it hasn't taken hold yet?

CentOS has very much taken hold :)

We are the top rated RHEL rebuild on http://DistroWatch.com/ (their
description, not mine :) ... and we are in the top 20 distros on
distrowatch, after a release we normally are near number 10.

We serve about 20TB of data per month from our update, BT, and download
servers.

We have average 15,000 downloads per month of just the Bittorrent images
of CentOS ... that does not include ISO images downloaded from external
public mirrors (there are more than 40 of those mirrors), or the CD
companies that sell CentOS CDs.

We have been distributed in at least 2 magazines (one in Germany, one in
the UK).  We are about to be distributed in the next issue of
http://www.apcmag.com/ (Australian PC Magazine).

Hundreds of ISPs offer CentOS based servers, 12 of them have donated
servers for our use in distributing CentOS.

(google for: centos dedicated server)
--------------------------------------------------
We are ranked higher than several big name Linux distros on both
Alexa.com and netcraft.com traffic monitors.  Some linux distros that we
have more traffic than include on Alexa include:

slackware, knoppix, mepis, xandros, Damn Small Linux, PCLinuxOS ... and
we are on par with Mandriva.com.

On netcraft.com www.centos.org has a site rank of 8765 ... mandriva is
8670.
-------------------------------------------------
Most of the help is obtained via this list, on IRC:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=8

or in our forums:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/

---------------------------------------------------
We have been the focus of several news articles from many places ...
some of which are called out here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=9

---------------------------------------------------
Several universities use CentOS, including Linux at Duke:
http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/25/426cc96cf1a9f?in_archive=1

And Boston University built a distro based on Centos:
http://linux.bu.edu/content/view/64/36/

Bromley College
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=95

Google on university and centos, there are dozens more :)
---------------------------------------------------
Several Projects are basing their products on CentOS as well:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=11

----------------------------------------------------

OK, that is enough for now :)

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
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