CentOS 5

16 Mar 2008 Next to Fedora 8, I plan to try out Centos 5 because it is supposed to be more secure and stable (why else would Redhat use it over Fedora ?)

It appears I can reuse the kickstart file I created for Fedora 8, since the installation went ok.

But then come the problems.

Under Debian, after a basic install, I can use this sequence of commands to install any package thats known in the Debian universe:

. /etc/bash_completion
apt-get install <some package>

I include bash_completion here because it is a vital tool for me on any modern Linux system (because I'm a bad typer, I rely on bash completion a lot. And it's also a lot faster to work with)

Under CentOS, there is no bash_completion and there is no apt-get. Instead, there is yum.
So first thing to try:

yum install bash-completion

FAIL! bash completion is not a standard package in CentOS. So what do I need to do to get bash_completion in CentOS ?

First, I need to magically be aware that this package is availabnle in a thirdparty repository called "RPMForge" (http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories)
Next, I need to configure RPMForge on my CentOS installation:

• Install the priorities package with yum:
  
  

  
  yum install yum-priorities
  

  
  


• 
  
• check /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/priorities.conf to see that its configured correctly (it was)


• Edit all *.repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and add a "priority=N" line in every config section where N differs depending on the section you're in
  
  

  
  [base], [addons], [updates], [extras] ... priority=1
  [centosplus],[contrib] ... priority=2
  Third Party Repos such as rpmforge ... priority=N (where N is > 10 and based on your preference)
  

  
  
  I really like that last line, where I can choose N based on "my preference". I took 13 since I have no idea how I should decide what my preference is
  


• Next, I need to wget an RPM here and install it
  

  
  wget http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
  rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
  

  
  


• yum check-update to check that it worked (! remember, this is supposed to be a stable system)


• And finally, install some package
  
  

  
  yum install <some package>
  

  
  

But wait, it's not over yet!

So now I have installed bash-completion using yum

yum install bash-completion

And it pulled it from RPMForge yay!

So, what did all this get me ?

Under CentOS, I can install 6537 (over 4000!) packages. I'm impressed.
Under Debian stable, I can install 19939 packages.

I checked the versions of bash and SSH under both CentOS 5 and Debian stable (currently Etch). They are the same: bash 3.1.17 and OpenSSH 4.3


I hope kickstart is able to configure everything for me and install bash-completion by default.
We'll see...