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Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
I've always just downloaded the CD images to a directory on my server that was visible with NFS. I always found installations over the network trivially easy with that method.
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I find nothing trivial about downloading six CD images' worth of stuff for a distribution I'm only going to use very briefly to test something.
In the case of what I was working on, I got done what I needed to do with Fedora. The next thing I'm doing with the drive that has the install on it is to wipe it.
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As for RPM, I don't have strong opinions about packaging methods. Yum has made RPMs pretty manageable. I will say that apt-get seems faster at resolving dependencies though. But then I like those big-ass installations so dependencies are less of an issue :)
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I, on the other hand, do have some opinions. I find RPM to be the most useless format out there.
In an emergency, RPM files cannot be broken open with "regular" Unix tools (and in this context, RPM does NOT count, not even rpm2cpio). With .deb files, all you need is ar(1) (from binutils), tar(1) and gzip(1). That helped enormously when I had a problem with the box which needed upgrading.
As for YUM, I found it annoyingly slow, and apt-rpm, while it made dealing with my Fedora setup easier, was not much better. APT on an Ubuntu system was a lot faster on even a Pentium III 600, the machine I used as a hackbox.
When I was doing some testing on NetBSD's pkgsrc collection, I installed Fedora solely to isolate whether there were any distribution-related problems. The netinstall was amazingly frustrating. I had to know beforehand a URL for a Fedora mirror to enter into a blank. I was never even given a helping hand, like a preset repository, like what Debian and Ubuntu have or even a format suggestion.
Once I got THAT working, I told Anaconda NOT to install X and GNOME during the initial setup when I booted the CD. What happened was it installed X and GNOME anyway. I wanted a text-only install, and I only wanted text-only stuff. I got that and more stuff I never wanted.
The first boot, it runs the first-run part, verifying basic settings, like network and such. After the first boot finishes running, I find that the network wasn't working right. The ethernet interface was configured up, but there was no default route. One reboot later, the network setup was NOT working at all, not even turned up. However, an /etc/init.d/network start fixed that.
This entire process happened not only once but TWICE (two different installs; the second on a drive that was bigger to accommodate more RPMs for an apt-get upgrade or a yum update or whatever it is; I never did the upgrade; it kept throwing errors, so I'm not even going to bother diagnosing it because the drive's getting wiped anyway).
In summary, I am very frustrated with Fedora and the way I wanted to try installing and using it. I somehow feel that CentOS and RHEL will be no different. I have never liked Red Hat's propensity to install just about EVERYTHING and more that I don't want or need. And I do not like the fact that Red Hat continues to use Sendmail as its default MTA, something I find to be even more distressing, given Sendmail's long, illustrious and, might I add, notoriously
bad security track record.
Not to mention, I don't like dealing with RPM to begin with, which alone drives me away from a LOT of distributions.
On a more positive note, Red Hat has finally gotten its act together, turning off most services which do not need to be on for an initial install (they had been on in the past, opening the machine up to a wide variety of exploits). That alone is a major improvement.
Put very simply, my recent experience with Fedora has reinforced the fact that I intensely dislike working on Red Hat and Red Hat-based systems. All of my experiences have been very bad. Maybe I don't understand the design philosophy, though one thing is certain: I do not AGREE with it.
OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: Please bear in mind that I'm only stating my opinion. I'm just saying what does or does not work for me. As the old cliche goes, Your Mileage May Vary(R).
--Ian.