[CentOS] Open Letter to Lance Davis

Fri Jul 31 18:12:57 UTC 2009
Marcus Moeller <mail at marcus-moeller.de>

Hi,

>> My 'dream' OS has always been one where the base install was extremely
>> minimal - just enough to install the rest over the network.  Then there
>> would be a way that anyone could 'publish' their installed list of
>> repositories and packages and anyone else could duplicate that machine's
>> setup just by picking that list from a set of choices with the installer
>> dealing with the hardware differences for you.  This would eliminate
>> most of the need for custom rebuilds and respins - at least for anyone
>> with network access, and in my opinion the optimal combination of many
>> thousands of packages is something that deserves to be be crowdsourced.
>
>>   But, so far no one has done it and whenever the discussion of modified
>> CentOS respins comes up the developers have seemed pretty lukewarm to
>> the idea, as though it would devalue their brand.
>
>        Such an OS, or release of an OS, would be mighty welcome to those
> of us with early notebooks/netbooks/whatever (such as the EeePC 701).

Re-Spins are yet possible. You can take a look at the LiveCD project:

https://projects.centos.org/trac/livecd/

to learn how to spin a custom CentOS LiveCD.

But please note: CentOS itself has a clear strategy which means
upstream compatibility. Nothing more and nothing less. No focus on
specialized systems (which does not mean you can create a custom spin
for an specific purpose, e.g. a CentOS netbook spin)

IMHO CentOS is not the best choice for latest consumer hardware nor
the best desktop OS (please don't blame me for that Dag ;)

Fedora already offers a lot of spins for different (end)use(r) cases.

Best Regards
Marcus