<snip> > My questions are several. > > 1) The build hardware is only a single processor with 768MB of memory (also a > P3) what if anything will I need to do to enable the second processor? (I'll > make provisions for a larger swap space at build time) I believe in CentOS 5, due to the popularity of hyperthreaded and dual core cpus, the base kernel is smp-enabled. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong > 2) The build hardware won't have a second disk usable for RAID, is it > possible to build the RAID as degraded during the install? Or am I better > off building it as a non RAID system and transfer everything to a RAID disk > later? I would do the latter. I've not tried building a raid, degrading it and then using it only to add another disk later, although in theory it could be done, I believe. > 3) The system bios will allow me to boot off the network, can I do an install > from that boot? there is no CD/DVD reader in the box, nor is there a floppy > drive. USB (flash?) may possible, but it is USB1.0 (1.1?) and quite slow and > I'm not 100% positive the BIOS will support booting from a USB device. Yes. Check out cobbler <http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/> > Any other caveats to be aware of? My experience with linux has been several > Fedora (core) releases some Redhad releases prior to that, and many many many > years ago slackware (when the install was a stack of diskettes!) Nope. I think you'll be fine. Welcome to CentOS! Barry