Okay, I have a confession to make, not so long ago I was a complete linux n00b. Back when I started in VERT (a little over a year ago) I could count the number of days I had used a non-MS OS on the fingers of one hand. Sure, I had played around with Linux as far back as Red Hat 5, and once, for about six months, I had Fedora Core 4 installed on a partition I never booted to, but I never used it enough to gain any mastery.

Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't one of the those "afraid of the command line", click-happy users. It was just that I had been working as a Windows systems administrator, I needed to live and breathe Windows systems. I could play around with *nix on my own time, but it just that, playing. I never *had* to make it work, so I never did.

Happily, one of the requirements for my role here was that I gain comfort with Linux and Unix based systems. I certainly saw my lack in that area as a weakness in my skill set and I wanted to tackle a distro which would really force me to get my hands dirty, so on the recommendation of a co-worker, I choose Gentoo running fluxbox as my window manager and ran it quite happily for more than 12 months.

However, after waiting 2 days (on a single core P4 2.7 GHz processor with 1GB RAM) for 'emerge -Du system' to upgrade gcc 3.6 to 4.1, upgrade X11 from 7.0 to 7.1, and then rebuild and recompile everything with the new compiler over the Christmas holidays I started to think that maybe it was time to expand my Linux horizons.

What I liked about Gentoo:
- the portage system, the ease of get, install, configure a wide selection of applications
- the BSD based configuration gave me (I believe) a very Unix-like feel to my configurations
- active and diverse user community
- minimal install, nothing running that I didn't want.
- getting application and kernel updates as soon as they are available.

What I didn't like about Gentoo:
- waiting hours to compile updated versions of firefox, X11, etc.
- waiting days to recompile everything when a gcc update occured.
- fixing all the things that break due to "bleeding edge" updates.

General feeling about Gentoo? Very positive. I would recommend it to a friend. But maybe not to a customer. It requires a lot of "hands-on" to keep it up to date, but I think it's a great distribution with plenty of active development and community support.

However, at this point I thought it would be good for me to try something else for a while, just to see "how the other half lives". I had played around with Ubuntu for a while, but it never grabbed me. It seemed too easy, too clicky for my tastes, and another VERT researcher and (sometimes) Ubuntu enthusiast with the same hardware warned me of various issues with the ATI drivers and his setup.

Seeing as my reason for changing was to learn a different way of using Linux, I was willing to endure something of a challenge to get it configured the way I wanted, so long as I gained something from the process. What I settled on was CentOS 4.4. Why? Cent OS is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative. A lot of people, a lot of our customers, use Red Hat and related distros. Learning the Red Hat way of doing things was something I couldn't afford to not do.

Next time... my thoughts on switching to CentOS.