Monday, June 15, 2009

CentOS Linux Distro Fiasco

My current tasks that I've been doing for the past few days involves deploying a machine with CentOS...

In a brief nutshell... CentOS is another kind of Linux-based operating system distribution. For comparison, Ubuntu originated or branched from Debian... and the direct counterpart of Debian is RedHat... CentOS was derived from RedHat. Since RedHat became a paid consumer OS, its popularity dropped a bit, but over the past few years CentOS was derived from RedHat and is released as a free operating system similar to Ubuntu.

CentOS shows characteristics and functionalities that originated from RedHat, and is more customizable and tailored to specific needs since it, CentOS, is used usually for server-based applications and database servers. The most common database deployment is the use of Oracle.

One main reason why CentOS didn't turn out quite a hit amongst open-source users is that it is not a forgiving operating system and is quite tedious to setup for the desired task it will handle. Since CentOS came from RedHat, it uses YUM for package management... which I find crappy and hard to use with respect to dependency library issues... apt-get from Debian works like a charm compared to yum.

I'm finding it very hard to just setup the machine with CentOS and the packages needed in order to deploy an Oracle Database server. I am already utilizing other package managers like smart and an apt-get for CentOS to handle the dependency libraries... sadly it is still giving me one hell of a time just trying to install one package at a time.

I just hope I still have the patience to finish this before mid of this week... deadlines are so much fun...

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