[CentOS] Introduction

Hi,

I'm a 40-year old sysadmin living in Montpezat, a small village in the 
sunny south of France. I'm a Linux user since 2001, when I made my first 
steps on a 486 with a Slackware 7.1 CD. I've tried maybe two dozen 
distributions, but I've stayed mostly with Slackware and Debian.

Since last summer, I work as a sysadmin for our "Communauté de 
Communes", a group of 16 villages, where I care for computers and 
installs of town halls and public libraries. I've configured a LAMP 
server in a datacenter, running Debian Sarge, and all clients in town 
halls and libraries are running Debian Etch, a highly stripped-down and 
personalized GNOME desktop with just a handful of apps needed for work.

I've fiddled with CentOS before, around when 4.3 came out, and it was a 
close second in the choice of OS here. Had 5.0 been out at the time, I 
would gladly have chosen it. I've discussed the subject with Daniel de 
Kok, a fellow ex-Slacker and friend, and he's told me so many good 
things about the latest release of CentOS that I'm now seriously 
considering replacing my Debian installs with CentOS.

I have an armada of PCs that i can fiddle with, and I've currently 
installed two different versions of CentOS, one as minimal as I could, 
one with a default GNOME desktop. On my personal laptop I have the Red 
Hat Deployment Guide, as well as some more CentOS-specific docs. I have 
a list of 40 or so items that I will have to take care of in the 
following days or weeks, maybe months: "minimal install?", "yum?", 
"configure wireless rt2500, rt61, ipw3945?", "find extra repos for 
multimedia stuff?", etcetera. I just went to take a peek at IRC, and 
"Arrfab" told me the main communication channel for CentOS was this 
mailing list.

Cheers from France,

Niki Kovacs
-- 
Dyslexics have more fnu.