Tom Brown wrote:
> Hi
>
> Installed my first CentOS box last night after coming from Whitebox -
> This is perhaps me being stupid but on install i opted for 'Custom'
> install as i prefer minimal and then build as i suit. I went through
> the list of things to install and removed everything apart from
> networking. Install happenned and tons of stull ended up being
> installed including X openoffice and the like - Why was that when i
> de-selected everything apart from networking? It was very much
> bloatware and not what i want on a server.
>
> thanks for any hints
> _______________________________________________
First, this is RedHat's direction, not something specific to CentOS
(just cloning you know).
This has been my complaint with RedHat products for some time now (about
rh 7.3 or so). CentOS is simply following that system. One of the things
that's really hard to get rid of are the graphical interfaces.... RH
manage this... RH manage that, which seems to make X-fonts install, but
I'm not sure if this is all. You can turn them off in one place and then
find them in set to install in at least one other situation. Got to turn
them off all over the place. An install of el4 versions seems to force
X, whether you want it or not, in spite of unchecking X.
I hate to say it, but it reminds me of Winders! Bloatware... Yeah! More
is better philosophy. I liked the rh 7.2 installation, where you
selected your packages, it did a dependancies check, provided a list of
what was going to be installed and the ability to go back and not
install whatever it was that was forcing the other depends aps, or to
accept those dependancies and go forward with the install. A great,
although perhaps a bit techinical installation process. I suppose this
is the price we pay for attempts at positioning the OS to the
mainstream. It needs the more automated methods, but I'm still a bit
upset that 'Custom Install' doesn't work like it used to and seems to
get worse with each new release.
I'm not so bothered by disk space as I am by more ways for intrusion.
It's just more crap to keep updated... and stuff that never gets used. I
do subscribe to the school of thought that it is best to stay within the
official RPMs and enjoy the beauties of yum or up2date. That has been
pretty darned reliable and greatly simplifies administation over
multiple machines. I really don't enjoy removing packages after the
install as it's pretty easy to break something doing that as well (and I
love these things that are broken that you don't find out about for 3
weeks, meanwhile... who knows what might be lost).
So, OK... yeah, you hit on one of my nerves with what RH has done... but
I'll live with it, but my 'score' for their OS gets reduced on this
front as well.
-----
Score reductions for RH: (not to be confused with score reductions for
CentOS. CentOS get A+++ on all fronts)
They weren't happy with my money for running up2date from their servers
but wanted more, stating they were going to give me support time. I
don't want support time, so I'm here. I wouldn't have minded more money,
but not that much more!
RHEL should have an upgrade path from one version to the next. I can
understand (barely) the lack of this ability from rh 9 to rhel, but from
el3 to el4? Yeah, so maybe I'd need to fix 50 config files, but that's
better than moving hundreds of hosting clients and the thousands of
configs for them. I am certain doing this would be an extremely complex
issue for RH.
Bloatware... and each release gets just a bit worse and is generally gui
related. We don't want no stinkin' GUIs on servers!
A general degradation in the quality of updates. I had exactly one issue
with updates from rh 5.2 through rh 7.2. I've lost count during my rhel
time... still not a lot, but at least 3 or 4.
The ability to legally run a 'test' machine fully updated without cost
went away. I used to 'buy' rh off the shelf. A bit more monetary support
for rh and most came with a free subscription. I would run a 'test'
machine with this subscription and feel more secure with going live with
new updates to the real world machines or simply to use it as a
'learning tool' without breaking somebody's stuff.
------
Still not quite enough to make me jump over to Debian... not while
CentOS is alive. But I think Debian has gained a lot of good people,
translated into more knowledge/more time and efforts/better packages due
to RedHat's change.
John Hinton
