[CentOS] Re: New to CentOS, and wondering about application availability

[Dave Gutteridge]

Most people on this thread do seem to get where I'm coming from. I am 
looking for a stable enough build, with a large community of support. 
That may yet still exist with CentOS, so long as I can get it up and 
running.

For those who are questioning if Linux is an appropriate choice for me, 
as I once explained on the Fedora list (Hi, Phil!), for the last year or 
so the applications I have been running on Windows are primarily open 
source. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and others. The only thing 
keeping me on Windows was Windows itself, and I've never really liked 
it. So all I'm looking for in a Linux distro is the stability to run the 
open source software that is already stable in Windows and have native 
builds for Linux. Surely that's not an unreasonable expectation of Linux?

I may have given the impression that I'm really looking for Multimedia. 
But actually, when I was saying that DVDs didn't work under FC4, I meant 
data DVDs which contained back up files. I would like to play 
multimedia, and I was using Xine as an example of an applcation I 
couldn't get running. But really my aspirations as a home computer user 
are a little less ambitious.

Thank you all for the whirlwind of information. As I see the situation 
now, I should probably try to stick with CentOS for a bit and see if I 
can get it configured properly.

To that end, I tried going to the "dag" repository but the suggestions 
for what to copy into my yum.conf file simply didn't work. As in, I put 
them into the conf file, then tried to isntall Xine, and it just came 
back saying "nothing to do".

Anyway, I copied the text that Tom gave me into my yum.conf file, and 
ran yum -y update, and eventually ot stopped on some public key error.
(4/7): kdelibs-3.3.1-3.11 100% |=========================|  15 MB    00:42
(5/7): freetype-devel-2.1 100% |=========================| 521 kB    00:02
(6/7): freetype-2.1.9-1.2 100% |=========================| 774 kB    00:02
(7/7): xmms-1.2.10-11.1.2 100% |=========================| 2.0 MB    00:06
warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
public key not available for rsync-2.6.5-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

One last note about information and being a newbie. People seem to be 
debating which information I need and which I don't. As a newbie, let me 
put it this way: there is no such thing as bad information, it just has 
to be priorized. Bryan can write the longest posting in the world, and 
it's fine so long as it goes something like in this order:
Here's what to do ro make things just work.
Here's how it works.
Here's why it works like that.
Here's the philosophy behind it's construction.
Here's the reasons why the alternate methods don't work.

All too often, those who know how things work are more concerned with 
explaining things from how they understand it that they lose sight that 
the first prority of any newbie is to just get it working. Someone on 
this list said it was critical to know what was happening when someone 
gives you a bunch of text that goes into the yum.conf file. Yes, it's 
good to know what is happening. But *after* I've copied the text in and 
made it work. I was glad that someone just said "Here, put this here, 
and then do this, and see if that works."

Dave