CentOS.
As usual I had my Broadcom issue and here it was one of the hardest to resolve.
CentOS is a enterprise or commercial Linux Distro. Based on the open rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Source so you know its routes are solid. Really CentOS is aimed really towards business’s but I don’t see any reason why you can use it on your desktop, obviously you would need to alter a few things like install codec’s but as I have already covered this on the Fedora review this won’t be a big issue.
I downloaded the .iso from the website http://www.centos.org and had a very quick read. Actually the website really isn’t that bad as it does include a few how too’s including how to install codec’s etc so was quite happy. Anyway download done and installed using Unetbootin and restarted and booted up.
First Snag
On the boot into the live environment I changed the keyboard and the language defaults from US English to UK English and then clicked log in. Obviously the usual happened my wireless wasn’t working I had the annoyingly common wireless (firmware missing) showing. Not a big issue as I encounter this on every Distro (except one) so I set about fixing. I had a little issue with using my iPhone which I stupidly blamed initially on Centos where it wouldn’t let me tether using the wire. I looked on my iPhone for a fix but no one else appeared to have this issue. I tried the IT Crowds response of switching it off and on again. First with my laptop then with my Phone and it did appear to be an issue with the phone. Once internet up and running I first turned to the Centos Wiki http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/Wireless/Broadcom.However, their system of doing things was a little long winded and I saw a similar thing with Fedora where they gave you a fix that took a half hour of typing where 3 mins would actually do the same thing (maybe not to the same standard but good enough for me) so I followed the advice from fedora;
Download Broadcom drivers via
http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
Then enter the following into the terminal
cd directory/where/you/putthe/download
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
su b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
At this point in fedora everything worked but in Centos life isn’t quite that easy so I followed up with;
sudo modprobe -wl -r
Then
sudo wl -r
This appeared to work and I now had wireless. I always test this in the live environment before I install the OS I want to make sure I can actually get my wireless working before I proceed any further. Once this was working I then set about installing the system
This is fairly straight forward but I wouldn’t recommend this one for beginners as there are possibly a few options that might be confusing if you’re not used to them. Once this was done the rest of the process was actually fairly quick. On restart and first boot and the usual configurations out of the way you are faced with a Gnome 2 desktop. If your sole reason for moving to this Distro is because of this I would recommend Debian first but that is because I’m personally used to apt-get etc but I tried to twist my thinking into believing this is to Fedora what Debian is to Ubuntu. It has a long support life so you know you will have a system that will have updates without having to reinstall every year. The system itself is actually very quick.
Second Snag
In the system you’re faced with an ancient version of Firefox and no option in the repository to install Chromium. To update to the new version of Firefox you need to follow the instructions here http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2011/install-firefox-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/ worked perfectly. I didn’t bother trying to install Chromium as I already had my eye on downloading and installing Mint Debian Edition. But the same (very helpful) website gives you info how to again http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-google-chrome-with-yum-on-fedora-red-hat-rhel/. I suppose it’s unfair to call this a snag as most systems tend to hold out of date software at the time of install due to the nature of the software world (especially Firefox) and when a OS is expected to be supported for 7 years for each major release out of date software really has to be a given.
I probably spent about 5 hours playing around and using Centos and had no crashes and had no issues which I wasn’t able to resolve. I was actually very happy but the lack of up to date software and the lack of other programs held in the repository meant I saw no reason to stick here. I’m not really looking for an OS that has a long support life at the moment so the main selling point of Centos didn’t affect me. I wouldn’t recommend this system for beginners as there are better Os’s to learn with but if you’re looking for a system that is rock solid and has the long support this or Debian are going to be your friends.
danslinux 