I’ve installed it and got things running. The way Red Hat does things is allowing folks to work from the RC and associated repositories without requiring a subscription. What I’m trying to do is get some experience so I can push CentOS 7 when it comes out and know something about what I’m doing. I can’t afford all that expensive Red Hat certified training so I have to get my experience the hard way.
And it’s hard. Right now there is no way I can play MP3s, for example. I’ve tried ATrpms and they aren’t ready. Too many dependencies aren’t finished and ready to install, so I get failures. I’ve also tried building VLC (stable branch) from source. I have managed to hack my way through a couple of problems, but now I have a persistent issue with a bogus error demanding I enable PIC on a library that was compiled specifically with PIC enabled (libpostproc). I also cannot get VMware Player to work, because the process for building vmnet drivers fails without any useful error reports. So far, the VM technology built into RHEL is over my head in complexity and I haven’t found any guides simple enough to make sense to me.
I’m going to try WINE in a day or two, but the point is that I can’t even use a VM to get something like XP running and play multimedia that way.
Otherwise, things are just dandy. I can’t imagine using the default GNOME desktop, so I’m running KDE. RHEL crippled the KDE PIM packages and I can’t get Kmail. It builds, apparently, but the RPMbuild process doesn’t kick out any RPMs for it. I think it’s clobbered in a patch Red Hat adds to the SRPM. So far, I’ve not been able to find anyone with enough knowledge to help me fix that.
This is definitely not a desktop OS for most people, and it’s also not ready for prime time. Yep, it’s an RC, but not gold and all the third party support is still incomplete.
Update:Building WINE failed, too. I was able to hack my way through some of the problems, but not far enough to finish. It requires having access to far more inside information than I’ll likely get any time soon.
It’s just too much. Everything remains too badly broken and apparently too much of it is intentional. That is, in pursuit of the corporate market, this thing is not for ordinary users. It’s not that I can’t deal with it, but I can’t help people this way, and I cannot afford to let the mission suffer.
