[CentOS] A few questions regarding CentOS (5.0)

[D Steward]

> - Why does the screen flicker on and off several times during boot and 
> when logging in?
I presume you mean when logging in at the console, the fonts look a bit
glitchy and flickery at times.
I can't recall the exact details, but this is a known RHEL5 bug, caused
by the system reloading the fonts every time a character or line of
characters is displayed.
There was one complicated workaround posted, but for now, this cannot be
resolved.
I don't see it now, in any case, since I login via ssh and dont need to
be at the console.

> - When I chose a pure console environment, without any X11 stuff, why 
> did a bunch of gnome packages get installed?
As strange as it may seem, some apps which are supposedly text-only,
have dependencies based on the gnome libs.
I can't remember the offending packages offhand, but I don't really care
much since disk-space is so cheap.

> - Is it possible to get a php-mssql package? -I need this if I'm going 
> to use CentOS at work..
> 
There is no default rpm for centos5, but one exists for Fedora.