Its late and I’m tired but I had decided a while back that I was going to port my servers to CentOS and tonite’s the night, everything is going to be all right. Well let’s hope. The cd is cranking but it seems sluggish in taking me through the graphical installation wizard. Ok, it is not happy about something. Maybe the graphical installation option was not the right decision.

Ok, I now opted for the “linux text” installation option and this is going through the options much quicker. This is also the option that I have used in the past with Red Hat. It has that ole Clipper / Paradox look to it. In the meanwhile I had made sure to move my wiki to my other Windows box and change the port forwarding tables on my router. However, I forgot that I had been supporting some of my blog posts images with an Apache server. That directory is now gone i.e. since I clobbered it with the CentOS installation.

I wonder how much of a dent CentOS is making into Red Hat’s Enterprise business. We use RHE at work and so for me it does make sense to use CentOS for my personal needs.

For those of you who don’t know CentOS is basically free Red Hat Enterprise. I don’t like the idea of not paying for things. Yes, I’m weird that way so If CentOS works out for me I’ll probably PayPal them about $50.00 per year. I recently purchased an inexpensive clone with an AMD Semprom board overclocking at I believe 3200, with 512 mb ram for less than $300.00. Its pretty amazing to me that one can very inexpensively setup a viable cluster. Reliability can be a matter of redundancy as opposed to dropping a lot of cash on HP blades.

Ok, the installation is finished. Gnome looks much better from what I recall last. I had switched to KDE sometime ago. What is cool about CentOS is that it has an update service such as RHE.

Now, I just have to get VNC to work from my Win XP notebook to the Linux boxes, install VW , Postgres, Gemstone and look into switching from SmallWiki to the WikiWorksForSSP framework. Not tonite. I keep nodding off , I’ll go to bed once I confirm that the packages updated without issue.