[CentOS] Tired of Fedora, shopping for a new OS. Upgrade from F8 ? CentOS kernel versions ?

Thu Oct 30 19:51:40 UTC 2008
Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com>

I've been a RH/Fedora guy since the RH8 days.  When Fedora came along, I
moved to it, but its been a bit painful beta testing software all the
time.   I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I found their package management
to be difficult... I do a lot of technical work, development and loading
and building special stuff.  I much prefer RPMs over other methods of
package distribution.

Presently I'm miffed with the Fedora community.  Back in July I blindly
upgraded to F9 because I was in need of a few things that it shipped
with.  Little did I know it contained KDE4 or more precisely a rough,
unfinished version of KDE4.  I stuck with it, however, and upgraded to
KDE4.1 and finally to KDE 4.1.2.

About a month ago I received a new laptop.  Being it was a new machine,
I did a fresh install of F8 on it, thus dumping KDE4.

While all has been well since then, I am watching the KDE4 release
schedule and noting that I don't think KDE4 is going to be done, ie
polished and ready to use until late spring, 2009.  I've also noted the
Fedora is going to abandon support for F8 before Christmas.  As F9
contains a very bleeding edge version of KDE4, I am loathe to upgrade to
it.   

Thus I am shopping for a new OS to solve this problem and the problem of
continually being a beta tester if one is an up to date Fedora user.
With Fedora it seems that one just gets a new installation working
nicely when support for it is dropped and the cycle starts all over
again.  I'd like to get away from that.

So... questions.

a) I am running F8 right now.   Most, but not all, of the package
versions seem about the same as CentOS 5.2.   Kernels are the notable
exception to this rule.  Could I forego F8 updates for a while, to leave
CentOS catch up, and then add the CentOS repository to my repo list and
"update" to the CentOS via yum ?

b) One of the things I really need are up to date (bleeding edge)
kernels.  For example, F8 has 2.6.26 kernels, whereas CentOS appears to
be running 2.6.18 kernels.  I do know how to build my own kernels, but
that is a pain.

Does someone keep a separate repository that has more modern kernels ?
Can yum be configured to use only specific packages (ie kernels) from a
specific repository ?

c) Is there any problem with using the livna repository for various
things that I might need ?  I notice that they don't have a CentOS
specific repository, but would it be OK to point to F8 or so and use
those RPMs ?

Thanks

I'm listening if you have any other comments or advice on my situation. 

LG