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

Wed Jul 27 12:47:38 UTC 2005
Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com>

Centos Mailing List,

    Hello. I have just recently installed CentOS on my home computer, 
and just joined this mailing list. I have a lot of questions so I will 
have quite a few postings in the next few days.
    I was using Fedora Core 4 for a few weeks, but it was unstable and 
had trouble reading some of my DVD drives and other issues.  So, I 
decided to switch to another distribution. I saw on one site that the 
three distros being nominated for best distribution by user's vote were 
Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora Core. I tried Ubuntu, but the installer kept 
failing. So I went to CentOS.

   Anyway, long story short, CentOS looks and feels just like Fedora 
(which I like), and it reads all my DVD drives normally, so I think I 
could be happy with it.
   But...
   When I tried to install Xine, using yum, it said it could not find 
it. And then I went looking for an RPM for Xine, and they're all for Red 
Hat or Fedora. I tried installing an RPM for Fedora anyway, reasoning 
that maybe they were the same in more than just looks, but no dice.
   As I looked around the net, it seems that applications all seem to 
have specific builds for Red Hat, Fedora, a couple of Debian builds... 
but no CentOS. Going by the amount of available information and support, 
Fedora is the primary Linux distribution, and CentOS hardly even exists.
   Can't I have it all? Stability, the ability to read my DVD drives, 
*and* a variety of applications?
  
    Is there any kind of resource for instructions on installing CentOS 
like there is this one for Fedora:
    http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html

Dave