CentOS 5

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:



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...