Tired of the constant nagging of the Anti-Virus, and MS Excel locking up on virus scan, as well as VMWare disabling sound entirely, and finally generally poor performance of the default Windows install on Dell boxes, I decided to switch to Linux as my primary environment for about the 8th time in my life.
I decided to go with CentOS 4.2, as CentOS is what I have installed on various servers that I admin. I backed up all the important data off the Windows box, and then started the adventure. First, download the DVD image from a torrent, which necessitates a BitTorrent client. Install the client, start the download, work on something else while it takes 6 hours to download. Burn the DVD, drop it into the PC, and reboot.
Try the graphical installer, but watch it fail from either the ATI X600 or the Dell 2405FPW. Try the text installer, installing everything, and reboot. No dice. Seems my RAID controller isn’t GRUB happy. So toss the RAID0 array, and re-install. Finally get it to boot, but into X, which is not working.
Reboot ‘linux single’ this time, editing /etc/inittab to start in runlevel 3. Then download the ATI drivers (never buy ATI if you want to use Linux out of the box), and try about 6 different ways to get it to work. Finally just hack the x config to tell it to use the native resolution, and finally everything seems to be working.
Now, just setting up my dev environment (svn, emacs, etc).
Linux is SO not ready for the desktop, at least as long as Dell is the number one vendor, and they ship mostly ATI, and ATI doesn’t open up their drivers. Holy Crap!
And yes, Steve, I did consider Ubuntu, but it is still downloading from the torrent, so CentOS won on sheer download speed. I am actually fairly impressed now that everything is working. The fonts don’t look bad, tabbed terminals, full firewall 
More updates later, as I settle in.
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December 19th, 2005 at 11:01 am
well, i haven’t used CentOS all that much, so i can’t speak to it with any authority (apart from the background, obviously). but i still think you’d be impressed by Ubuntu, should it ever complete downloading
December 19th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
I am actually going after the live CD to see if it is worth a switch. What are the chances that the ATI card ‘just works’?
December 21st, 2005 at 11:08 am
Switching To CentOS 4.2
CentOS is a desktop development system that is available from BitTorrent….
December 25th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
not sure on the ATI front, but Ubuntu’s your best bet for out of the box support IMO. it’s been good on every piece of hardware i’ve tested it on.
December 26th, 2005 at 2:11 am
I used a Linux desktop at work for over a year as a UNIX server developer.
However, nowadays, I still have my Linux desktop, but I use Windows and SSH into the Linux machine. I ultimately switched after one too many Evolution/Exchange headaches. I think it is safe to say that Outlook works better with Exchange than Evolution (and many things work better for email than Evolution) and Microsoft Office works better than OpenOffice. This way I get usable office applications and a real Linux environment. I’ve always been more of a terminal and VIM person, so SSHing into a machine has always been sufficient. May not work for you, but potentially you could set up Cygwin with X on the Windows machine as well.
I should setup Samba on my Linux machine, so I can mount it from my Windows machine. That would save the only annoying issue I have: trying to send something I’m working on as an attachment.
January 2nd, 2006 at 12:47 am
I tried every 64 bit distro out there so I can run LTSP and Vmware workstation 5.5 at the same time. I finally ended up with Centos 4.2. I had to use an old mach64(pci) ati video card because my ati x700e wouldn’t work. There are only a few Linux distros that work out of the box with this card. The biggest stumbling block was getting LTSP 64 to properly install the i386 clients.
I am very impressed how well it worked with all 64 bit code.
- CentOS 4.2 X86_64
- 4.2.2EL X64_86 K12ltsp
- Vmware Workstation 5.5 64bit
My hardware:
ECS MB with 3800+ dual core amd64
nforce4 sata - 4 sata drives using druid soft raid
It’s awesome, I just wish I could get the x700 to work. I guess I will have to go and buy a geforce card. Does anyone have any recommendations for the most compatible nvidia video for 64 bit Centos 4.2?
January 2nd, 2006 at 4:14 pm
I guess I need to upgrade to dual core
August 21st, 2006 at 6:00 pm
CentOS 4.3 here and I love it. Ubuntu 6.06 is alot buggier than previous versions. Previous Ubuntu was where I learned Linux but as I got more educated, I went to CentOS as it is Red Hat clone. I like the fact that I am learning a distro that’s in alot of Enterprise and considered to be Enterprise level - no that Ubuntu could not be. From a Linux application support for the verticals and commercial - Red Hat is where its at - period. The look and feel out of the box was not hot - but once I customized my own for the desktop - VERY NICE! All I can say is thanks to the CentOS team!
September 4th, 2006 at 11:39 am
CentOS (now at 4.4) has settled in as my standard at home and on the desk at work (my company uses RHEL in the data center). You’re right, ATI is definitely *my* last choice for graphics on a Linux machine. Ironically the stock Intel GM series motherboard video is a no brainer for most applications. Dell, however, in its infinite wisdom, ships ATI’s X300 or X600 with it’s “N” series open source desktops, when the Windows version of the same hardware has the Intel GM as an option. It’s almost as if they’re trying to turn people off to Linux. Look around the ‘Net for the latest articles on using ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver with the X series cards. After the short term fix of using x.org’s open vesa driver I switched to fglrx a while ago and it’s been working well for me.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Steel,
I’m having the same trouble with the X64_86 LTSP not wanting to accept the i386 clients. How did you fix it?
Thanks,
t
December 13th, 2006 at 8:01 am
Just a follow up. I replaced the ATI card I was using with an nVidia 6200TC — huge difference. Not only did my graphics performance improve dramatically, but with the handy utility nVidia ships with the latest Linux driver it’s easier to control.