All I can say is “WOW!” No, not the fan-boy stuff; it has to work the way I work. I can be quite merciless about discarding the most expensive, the best supported and wildest hyped, and I really could care less who you are and what matters to you — if it won’t work for me, it’s not worth my time. I haven’t tested every detail, but I’m getting there. However, the things I always look at first are the things which impress me most about CentOS.
Display: As with any really good Linux implementation, the installer figured out what to do. It configured the Radeon driver for my M6 chipset, and the driver configured the display from there. Good enough. The only flaw was the expected reluctance of a US based industrial Linux distributor to enable the bytecode hinting in Freetype2. Once I fixed that, the fonts were great. Indeed, the one complaint I have about Debian-based distros is the one thing they’ve always done differently from everyone else, and that’s fonts. I’ve never liked Debian-style font rendering. Even when I did the dpkg reconfigure chase, it would never work as I liked. CentOS, with the Freetype fix, is the way it ought to be.
Power Management: This works. I didn’t have to do anything. The scripts have figured out exactly what to do, and I can use both suspend (ACPI S3) and hibernate (ACPI S4) without any twiddling or configuration. No other distro has worked that well on this laptop.
Cream: This was broken on both Etch and Lenny. It didn’t matter if I installed from repository or from source. I could never get the spell check to work on-the-fly. I just installed it on CentOS and it worked immediately as it was advertised.
I’ve decided I really don’t need FlashPlayer and will probably not bother with most other multimedia stuff unless there’s some demand for me to have access to it. So, here’s to the folks at RedHat for doing the background work, and the CentOS folks who faithfully repackaged it. This is something every other distro should want to be.
Update: Wifi is a little tricky. While the drivers are present in the updated kernel, the default installation does not turn on the Network Manager. Without that, the whole thing would be manual. Once I got that started:
/sbin/service NetworkManager start
it all worked just fine. The icon appeared in the notice area of the top panel. It was a simple GUI operation with a little typing for the WPA2 key. Then it was a matter of:
/sbin/chkconfig –level 345 NetworkManager on
to make sure it wasn’t an issue again.
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“This works”??? Other distros also work! I don’t see the point of this post.
Maybe I can clarify it for you. Here on my blog I’ve been posting about my Dell Inspiron 4100 and some of the efforts I’ve made to make it useful. I’ve made posts about Win2K, XP, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Lenny & Etch, etc. Now I’m posting about CentOS. On this machine, other distros don’t work as well.
I suppose if you took a moment to glance at the other posts on this blog, the context would become more obvious to you.
Thanks for the clarification. The title of the post is not very informative, at least for me. I think for a potential reader something like this would be more useful: CentOS 5.3: This Works on my laptop, or CentOS 5.3: It works better than other distros on my laptop. Sorry, for complaining 🙂
If you want to see a reader’s feedback 🙂 , I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn google to find the missed pieces. Thanks, anyway!
That’s fine. It was not meant to be a full tech piece. I was just happy at the improvements over previous CentOS releases, and happy to find something well-suited to his old laptop. I’m not really expert enough to do much more than that.