The Android Play

Posted on January 11, 2015 by ehurst

For now, I can’t imagine doing any significant amount of typing on this tiny folding keyboard. However, I’m trying to see how much of my computer use can be shifted to my tablet. The objective is some nebulous sense of need to be as mobile as possible.

It’s no secret that the PC as a device is already obsolete for most people, and the laptop isn’t far behind. We’ll still see netbooks for awhile, but for personal use, mobility is a major element in the cultural shift currently under way. Most of the people I see daily access the Internet through their smartphone. I’m not ready to go there yet.

However, my own personal use for computers in general is fading fast. A decade ago I had my face in the flickering glow of the screen almost the entirety of my waking hours. Now it’s down to a few hours each day. I doubt this part of my ministry will end soon, but my life and the focus of my attention is moving away from the virtual world.

That is, instead of being a separate thing, it merges into the background as something almost taken for granted as a public utility. I realize that’s a poor metaphor, but most of my readers are likely to understand how this thing has become so ubiquitous that, even the gaps in service availability is merely a fact of life. The point is that it is no longer a central element in my thinking, and becoming less so. Whether the direction we are going as a society is any better is another question, but to have lived such a computer-geek existence was too close to religion for me. That was a hindrance to my ministry.

So for that part of it, I rejoice. It’s time to move into a different way of life.

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Conviction versus Guilt

Posted on January 11, 2015 by ehurst

One of Satan’s greatest victories has been the mythology of objective truth.

Do you know that the root cause of crippling false guilt is the imagination that you have transgressed some objective standard? That you will have to deal with that grouchy Norse deity that Satan has given us as the replacement for the God of the Bible? And that said Norse deity is implacable, legalistic and nit-picking, always seeking an excuse to crush us?

I’m in no position to rebuild your mind. I can’t reach inside and readjust your consciousness and your unexamined sense of reality. All I can do is tell you what I’ve experienced of God’s truth.

When we sin, it is personal. It is a personal affront to God, not failure of some objective standard. His Laws are not like that. They are personal and vivid and highly contextual in many ways. False guilt leads you to seek a path to pay, to recompense for loss, as if you were someone’s insurance company or lawyer for tort claims. That’s the wrong approach. Real guilt and a sense of conviction for sin is a matter of broken communion. What you must do is develop a sense of personal loyalty, not legalistic compliance.

When God said, “Come, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) about transgressions, it was all about you and God face to face, a personal relationship. We have those words in song, but still the image of an implacable God persists in our culture. It’s wrong. False guilt is imposed by far lesser beings seeking to control you for their own ends. Learn to reject it. It’s not about turning around to follow the rules, but it’s about restoring a broken heart. The proper context is Ancient Near Eastern feudalism; you are accountable personally to your Lord.

The Law of Moses was loaded with exemptions and various means of offering a token sacrifice, not an offering of some imaginary equal value, but a token of sorrow, a mere symbol. Sin costs; blood is the price because it violates the fundamental moral character of God woven into Creation. Now, since Christ, the final and ultimate price in His blood has been paid. All it needs is genuine love for God, a moral desire to be faithful to Him. He knows what temptations you face and is willing to look past your weakness, but it means facing Him, not hiding somewhere.

Boldly come before the Throne of Grace (Hebrews 4:16).

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Psalm 32

Posted on January 10, 2015 by ehurst

Hebrew theology acknowledged the Spirit Realm but carefully avoiding presuming to say much about it. The primary issue was not whether one’s spirit was alive or dead, but whether one was morally alive or dead. One who seemed morally insensitive was typically referred to as a “fool” who would, at best, play sharp with the words of the Covenant. By the same standard, though, a sensitive conscience was as much as one could expect from someone morally alive. It wasn’t a question of always doing the right thing, but of always bearing a sense of penitence. If you felt a genuine sense of sorrow over your mistakes, there was always room to repent.

Thus, this psalm celebrates the morally awakened soul. God is not a nag; a festering guilty conscience is a liar. Rather, a genuine sense of accountability to a very personal sovereign Lord is the point here. Thus, how sweet it is to know when your Lord has restored you to Covenant blessings! It’s better to learn not to try hiding even little things, but to face the music for your mistakes. David describes the gnawing sense of terror that comes from trying to ignore your conscience. There is simply no place to hide. It’s better to learn the habit of seeking God’s face early, because the curses of Covenant failure can pile up pretty quickly.

Righteous people have little to fear in this life. They are quick to rejoice and celebrate the goodness of God. Having experienced a good bit of testing, David says rather assertively, “Let me teach you a thing or two about this Covenant life.” He promised there would be no games; he will maintain bold eye contact. You can learn or you can be a stubborn draft animal who requires a bridle because it cannot be trusted to behave on its own. Better to serve God with a will than be forced by the constraints of the Law. That gets painful quickly. Life is far more pleasant for those who make Jehovah Lord.

Those whom God has granted a moral awareness are truly blessed of all humanity on this earth.

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Paint Your Own Picture

Posted on January 10, 2015 by ehurst

Don’t ape the particulars; strive for the essence.

You and I cannot be genuinely Hebraic, nor should we desire it. The context of that era is long gone in human experience. The people who bore it naturally threw it away and we are left with mere shreds and hints of what it may have been. Instead, we have only the cream of their national literature.

Apparently this is enough. Paul told us that we aren’t supposed to absorb the whole context, but to find ourselves buried in the pages of Scripture. Such was the meaning of the admonition to be a workman not ashamed, able to accurately shave off the context that doesn’t apply to us. We can learn the meaning of the Word in our own personal context and discern the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

The problem is that we also have to shave a lot of our own context, as well. This is why I champion the Hebraic image, because until you recognize what it is the separates us from our best understanding of the Ancient Hebrew, you cannot begin to recognize what does and doesn’t matter in your own context. I’ve offered hints in my fiction writing of what I imagine it could be if we were to find that special place the Hebrews held within our own time and place in history. However, it is not for me to steer the masses to a future cultural nirvana that would replicate the same power and presence in human history.

Rather, I call out to those able to hear that we must all find our own unique place largely because the Savior has promised He would not interfere much in human history. Instead, He moved the focus out of this world so that we could sanely abstract what the Hebrew nation could have had, and perhaps did have now and then at points in her story. The whole point is that we do not have to purchase with our lives the Hebrew identity as the single best representation of serving God. He came to bring all people nigh to the Father’s throne, all on the same terms, terms for which Hebrew identity was merely a parable.

So the big problem here is spending enough time delving into the Hebrew identity as those people were until we begin to get a sense of where we can and should be. I don’t have a cool name for it, something that would splash down in the middle of global human awareness. We start from the assumption that such cannot happen and we shouldn’t want it. Merely desiring that is an artifact of our own damned culture. I’m calling it Hebraic only because we have to start somewhere, and identifying a first way-point on the journey is the best way to get moving.

Please don’t assume I’m all about returning to the Hebrew world. Sometimes I’ll mask that by referring to the Ancient Near East, but even that is just a way of changing our sense of reality. They had something that was thrown away before we came along, and we need to dig it back up. Something in that is durable and still alive, while the mere trappings have rotted away into the dust. Wood and cloth dissolve, but gold never corrodes. Let’s rediscover the rich heritage and vast riches of what our barbaric forefathers bulldozed down without a clue to what was truly valuable.

Our world isn’t particularly evil, just empty. It’s essence has been up to now a persistent blind preference for emptiness; that’s the evil part. Most people don’t insist on emptiness, but simply don’t know it’s empty. Our world imagines that there is nothing beyond what man can measure and has built a vast container for measuring, but there is nothing to measure. Fill the container; burst the old wineskins with the ferment of new wine. Show how it is wholly unsuitable for truly living. We aren’t offering anything that hasn’t been available all along, but people have refused to see it, never mind understand its value.

Do you see how I can exhaust all the metaphors? Folks, we have been denied our divine heritage in Christ. Reclaim the divine justice that Our Savior taught.

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Restoring Divine Justice

Posted on January 9, 2015 by ehurst

A life worth living requires a vision bigger than yourself.

God’s wrath is also God’s blessing. When the Lord brings His Presence to bear on a human situation, some will feel His wrath, some will feel His loving mercy, and most will get a heavy dose of both. But the power of God is to cleanse away sin even while it empowers virtue. By sin I refer to moral injustice and all the results of it. Virtue is moral justice as defined by His character.

When Jesus did all those miracles, it was restoring the blessings of the Covenant. Those blessings did not come without the preaching of repentance. Starting with His cousin, John the Baptist, the message was, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” While Jesus surely knew many would misinterpret that message, it didn’t change the message.

You and I here at Kiln of the Soul are studying the character of God in the sense that we want to understand divine justice. Insofar as we can know Him, this is our only path in this life. This is how we bring Him glory, walk in His name, elevate His reputation and make Him famous — those are all the same thing. They all amount to restoring His divine justice. When we live by the moral Laws of God, things change. Creation itself is hard-wired to respond. What brings Him glory shines also upon us.

Your heart is then free to sense His Presence in His Creation. No two of us will have precisely the same experience. No two of us will express His mercy and justice identically because each of us has our own moral identity.

So if, in the midst of my bringing to other people His justice and mercy, some of them take unjust advantage of it, my part in it is unchanged. God will take care of that; it’s not my problem. My problem is me and my fleshly resistance to letting go and letting God. Compassion is my duty. The only time I pull back is when my heart tells me I must in order to preserve the reputation of God. Not His reputation as measured and noted by men, but His reputation in His own terms. His glory is what He says it it; He decides what His image will be among men. Their reception is their problem.

Don’t compartmentalize the vision; see the whole sweep of things. It’s not enough that we commune with nature alone, as if we could exclude fallen humans from that work of mercy. Nor can you exclude the rest of Creation simply because you are good with people. Dividing them is artificial in that sense. Turn on your heart and let God decide. You might well emphasize one thing over another by the calling on your life, but there remains a sense in which nothing is excluded. You cannot limit how God will work through your mission. Wherever you go, you carry the divine Presence, and Creation itself sings the song of redemption to see you bringing it. Some people will always notice and respond in one way or another. It will always be a mixture of wrath and blessing, but His children know that even His wrath is His love.

We look forward to His cleansing fire, and we are eager to share it.

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StT: Another Sample

Posted on January 8, 2015 by ehurst

All truth is God’s truth. Otherwise, it’s baloney.

There’s an underlying principle at work when we study the Scripture here at Kiln of the Soul. We leave the door wide open for Our Father to decide how He will speak to each individual. I’m not going to tell you that He cannot bless you with secular songs or even pagan literature. That doesn’t make those sources sacred; it’s that God cannot be confined to whatever we might define as “sacred” on this earth.

But one thing is for sure: You cannot claim to hear from God and reject the Bible. You will be required to figure out how to handle any apparent conflicts between Scripture and other sources you may like, but if you don’t take the Bible seriously, I don’t have to treat you as a spiritual-moral equal. But you see, the Devil takes the Bible seriously enough to twist its contents. Here’s another sample from my work on the red herring of “spiritualizing the text.”

Matthew 4:6

For once, it seems Matthew offers us a more literal rendering of a prophecy. That’s because he’s quoting Satan, who is misusing a quote from Psalm 91:11-12.

This section of Psalms begins with the 90th, written by Moses, and we can safely assume that the next few following songs are also from the same source. Thus, we have a continuing thread of thought. In 91, it’s all about the faithful man of God. In typical Hebrew style, it’s a mixture of dramatic symbolism, often in the form of hyperbole, along with more literal statements. The reader is expected to go with the flow, lose themselves in the moment, and know instinctively what to make of it. Read enough Hebrew literature and you’ll figure it out, but you have to adapt your reading to the Hebrew frame of reference.

So the two verses Matthew quotes work out to standard Covenant promises. They are part of a context which combines verses 10-13. The part about angels is fairly literal, but how do you describe their work, since you typically don’t see them? Even if you do catch them literally in the act, with your very human eyes, it would be far more important to understand their actions always as symbolic manifestations of something more important.

Satan correctly deduces that the angels were tasked with keeping good care of Jesus the man, who lived perfectly, well above the demands of the Law that promised the Father’s care. The context is Satan trying to get Jesus to perform actions which the Pharisees would interpret as clear signs of the Messiah, following the False Messianic Expectations. One of them specifically suggested the Messiah would jump down from the pinnacle of the Temple plaza — the point where the terrace had been extended far out from the original ancient site, and the southeast corner stood some 70 feet (21 meters) above the ground below. According to the fake prophecies, the Messiah was supposed to announce Himself by jumping down and landing safely, in part because of a misreading of this passage in Psalm 91.

Jesus says that He refuses to be that Messiah. The act itself was not consistent to Scripture, but constituted flinging a challenge in the face of God. This is typical of the literalist rendering of the Pharisees, not to mention the modern Pharisees among Protestant theologians.

Finally, Matthew quotes Jesus responding to this and another temptation by correctly quoting Deuteronomy 6, verses 13 and 16. Those were rather obviously meant literally in the first place.

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Compute Morally

Posted on January 7, 2015 by ehurst

Can the Law of Noah apply to computers?

My wife has run Win7 on her desktop machine since it was released. It’s not that she never found any unwanted malware, but that it never affected the operation of her system. Her efforts always paid off, and her protective software saved her from any sorrows. This is someone who surfs a lot of Facebook and other places where scams and malware have been passed through false advertising, but it never hit her.

This machine is under my moral dominion. Someone gave me that computer, and I eventually passed it over to her. Aside from Facebook and the games there, she uses it for her family history research, and chases recipes and natural medicine. Other family members have used it some, as well. It’s not that the pastor is so holy and righteous, but he and his wife are reaping the blessings of the Laws of God. When you seek His favor and meditate on the implications of His moral character, He extends His hedge of protection over all that you do for His glory. Everything you touch then belongs to Him.

So if He wants us to suffer something, there’s a reason for it and we bear it with grace. Apparently He’s not interested in us having to deal with computer problems of our own. I still fix a lot of other folks’ computers, but ours tend to be pretty stable and manageable.

BTW, I did have another problem with the laptop. Apparently the developers at RHEL, from whence CentOS gets all their code, are not interested in making everything work properly on laptops. It is server software, after all. That’s where Red Hat’s income is. So it burned through a battery charge in about half the time it should have, and refused to connect to my Android device, and a few other things just didn’t go quite right. So I gave up.

Someone had given me a copy of Win7 and I installed that. It’s a hassle because I had to chase down the drivers, since the manufacturer had no plans to support Win7 on this thing (it’s a Win8 machine). I don’t get all the software I like pre-installed, and it means worrying about a whole bunch of things that don’t affect Linux. I’m sure there’s a reason for that and I am not going to speculate, but I sense that God is showing me something. So I am at peace and things work, but it’s a lot of work for me. I’m not worried in the sense of anxious, but in the sense that I know Windows is much more vulnerable than Linux, so it needs more care. The shepherd has to herd computers, too.

At any rate, I’m doing the best I know to please my Father and seek His favor. My story is that it has always paid off in terms of His promises. That it hasn’t always been what I wished simply shows I need help getting my wishes adjusted.

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Treasury of Hearts

Posted on January 6, 2015 by ehurst

I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14:12 NET)

I spent a lot of time among the Neo-Pentecostals, AKA Charismatics, along with the old line Pentecostals. They’ll mix with each other, but maintain a recognizable difference. Aside from the typical doctrinaire assertion that you are only half-redeemed if you don’t engage in glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) they both share a tacit condemnation of the person if that person doesn’t lay hold of all the wonderful miraculous things they claim come with their movement. The underlying assumption is that Jesus said it was all for us, and the only reason you don’t have it is that you just don’t believe.

Compare this against the Cessationists: They believe all of that stuff was a special dispensation only for the first generation of Christians. Once all the Apostles died, those miracles were done. They assert there are no genuine Gifts of the Spirit these days and that the Charismatics are all lying, or at best, self-deceived.

There is a large segment of Western Christianity that avoids the excesses of the former group while unconvinced by the arguments of the second. All of them tend to work together on certain common interests, as you might expect. You cannot put people into organized groups without pushing an interest, and it will always be political in nature. All of them want to change this world, though they are certainly interested in changing the individual soul.

Of course, the fundamental flaw in all of them is a Western orientation. While the Charismatics surely do see some good things happening in the lives of people, helping to persuade some of the hardest sinners to repent, they have a poor grasp of God’s moral character. Thus, much of what they claim is suspect purely on the grounds that they are focused on the wrong level. They talk about the heart, but it’s a very muddy concept still deeply tainted with emotion. They confuse the Two Realms promiscuously. The Cessationists are simply too cerebral, keeping alive the spirit of Pharisaism that way. They insist that the sin of the Pharisees was simple hypocrisy. They don’t understand that the ancient concept of hypocrisy is quite different from ours today. Yet they manage to do some good things, as well.

You won’t catch me suggesting that these folks all need to stop what they are doing. I’ll dispute their assertions, but it does virtually no good at all taking the message to them. And I’m not interested in upsetting the applecart for them. I have learned through a lifetime of ministry that you can manipulate folks into anything you can imagine, but a genuine change in the soul requires a miracle intervention of God. Manipulation is a work of mere human talent, and requires a vast system to keep it alive. The real thing tends to keep working without any system at all. It’s not a question of human need, but of what God will do. That is, we work within the limits of God’s calling on our lives, and we stop at the moral boundaries these others cannot recognize.

Because of what I’ve seen in this lifetime of ministry, I’m quite content to leave people where they are. I recognize the human urge to fix it for them, but that’s not a moral urge. I can rejoice in the moral good that comes out of their work, even while I realize much of that good is accidental. My whole point is that none of them have a clue about the moral character of God because they insist on filtering all their contact with reality through a Western frame of reference. So long as you retain those Western assumptions about reality, you will never really find the God of the Bible.

So I reject the whole discussion about miracles and cessation. On the one hand I assert God still does miracles, but I most certainly don’t define “miracle” as Western Christians do. I do see a serious limitation on God’s promises, but it’s not some doctrinaire assertion that God doesn’t work that way any more, but that God won’t do much in a system that rejects His hand. Instead of the everyday experience of His mercies by His promises, we get only those miracles that He insists on doing despite us. Thus, it’s not a question of making oneself believe against the flesh and unbelief, but that no one involved knows what to believe. That is, they are so Westernized that they aren’t even on the same planet with what the Scripture says.

This is part of what John saw in the Apocalypse, a part of the depth of sorrow conveyed by his prophetic images. He knew that Christians would lose touch with that Ancient Hebrew Mysticism, and thus lose themselves in a Pharisaical fantasy of Hellenized rationalism. This may not be the End Times in any sense, but having found the treasury of the Ancient Hebrew approach to Scripture, I am determined to hold it up for all to admire, regardless whether their eyes can see it. There is enough for everyone.

I have no idea how God grabbed your attention and brought you here. There might be common threads, but Jesus Himself told the twin parables of the Pearl of Great Price and the Treasure Found in the field to illustrate that we cannot guess how God calls people to Him. That He called some of you here is the true wealth of my life right now, the rich treasure that justifies my continued work and effort. Not the human thrill of being noticed, so as to boost my ego, but that I have a sense some of you, at least, are catching hold of God’s truth. Even if I stood alone, I would forge ahead and continue posting what I’ve learned just so I can talk about it and use it myself. But as you surely understand, sharing that treasury of truth with others increases its value. You are for me a significant measure of His glory, the thing I seek above all.

I love you all.

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Spiritualizing the Text: Sample

Posted on January 5, 2015 by ehurst

I’m working back through the passages where the New Testament writers were guilty of “spiritualizing the text” of the Old Testament. That’s sarcasm; I reject the notion there is anything wrong with doing that. Yet the same people who assert that it is wrong ignore how often it was done in Scripture itself.

I never finished the series because there were so many passages that offered a good example of it. I’m thinking about trying to finish the job and making it a book. For now, here is a sample of my work:

Matthew 1:23

The first one is easily the biggest and hardest to summarize. We note in passing that Matthew’s Gospel is one of the most Hebraic works in the New Testament. His style is very Old Testament, as it were, so if anyone sets the tone for what’s culturally appropriate, it’s Matthew.

He quotes Isaiah 7:14. When we read that in its context, we realize Isaiah was referring to the threat to Judah from the alliance of Ephraim and Syria. He was saying something like this: Assume a young virgin marries today and conceives a son. By the time that boy is old enough for his Bar Mitzvah, so is the length of time it will take for God to reveal His deliverance from the kings of Ephraim and Syria. There is some dispute about the time frame meant by this, but the point is Matthew clearly does not use this passage as intended by Isaiah.

That is, unless you take a moment to consider Matthew didn’t suffer the Western Christian paranoia about the Virgin Birth. This one thing is easily the second item of faith dismissed by Western skeptics, right after they dismiss the Resurrection. It is thus one of the most sensitive topics for Fundamentalists — it’s one of the Five Fundamentals. There is the unique claim to be the Son of God, and Virgin Birth is part of that package. Given Matthew and the other Gospels go on to pointedly state Joseph kept Mary chaste until after Jesus was born, that Mary conceived without human sex, we aren’t in any trouble if we simply realize Matthew wasn’t emphasizing that here.

Typical of Hebrew thinking, this passage is loaded with subtle references, and justly so; the Hebrew God is addressing a Hebrew man in the Hebrew language. If you ignore all of that subtle mysticism inherent in Hebrew writing and culture, it’s easy to be panicky about using this passage as a literalist support for the doctrine. That approach is awfully hard to reconcile with Isaiah’s obvious intent. So how about approaching from the Hebrew perspective? Isaiah’s promise of deliverance from the kings north of Judah foreshadowed something much bigger; it was a parable, both literal fact and symbol. Those kings eventually died in battle against Assyria, but then Assyria played rough with Judah until God killed Assyria’s king, too.

On the one hand, Matthew’s narrative shows God commanding Joseph to take no offense from Mary’s pregnancy; she wasn’t fooling around. God did this; divorcing her would be unjust. “Be a good man and adopt the son she will bear.” God connects that to the prophecy of Isaiah about how long it would take to bring about deliverance. The focus for Isaiah was prodding Ahaz back to the Covenant Law, by pointing out how well God keeps His end of the Covenant. So while this business of the Virgin was both literal and symbolic, it had more to do with the Law. Jesus came to fulfill the Law, something Ahaz and all the nation of Israel failed to do, despite the generous and patient deliverance God provided. Born purely by God’s hand, yet under the Law (born of a Jewish woman), Christ would enter the world without the taint of sin. He would be able to obey His Father and Joseph should keep his eye on the future Bar Mitzvah of his adopted son. Once that symbolic ritual comes, look for this boy to manifest beyond all doubt His destiny.

You could say all of that is devotional in nature and is not found in the historical-literal approach, but I counter this is precisely how a Hebrew mind would read it. It’s almost funny how, if we see Matthew pulling out a radically literalist reading of Isaiah, it violates the historical-literal approach. If we read it all fuzzy and mystically, it makes perfectly good sense. God has a sense of humor.

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Updated Migration Considerations

Posted on January 4, 2015 by ehurst

Background: I’ve helped a few folks migrate from Windows to Linux. The reasons vary, but most of them were simply tired of having to fight the malware or instability issues. One client was concerned purely with high security and personal privacy. Most of them asked me a lot of questions, but almost none of them were willing to research it that much for themselves. Can’t blame them; there’s way too much out there, particularly when it comes to playing with Linux. Worst of all, virtually everyone you talk to about it has a strong partisan slant to their favorite. They act like it holds all possible solutions. When it doesn’t, the problem is you, not the favored Linux distro.

If someone wants my help, I can offer only what I know. You can learn just so much about it before you lose contact with the practical considerations of real people in the real world. Linux is like that, so there aren’t many folks who keep a foot in both worlds. I’m trying to fill that void. What makes it harder is that computer technology is a moving target. What’s best today may be awful tomorrow. Still, you have to settle on something and get the work done. Computer technology shouldn’t be a religion, something you do for its own sake. It’s worth stands on how well it serves a higher purpose.

For the time being I have come to favor CentOS 7 as the primary target of migration for folks who aren’t much into gaming or entertainment. In other words, it’s one of the best for SOHO clients, or those close to it. Chances are, if you choose this path, you won’t be stuck with something that becomes overly burdensome later. The whole point is that CentOS is an officially accepted clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and RHEL is designed for corporate use. It’s the premier business grade Linux in the US, at least, and generally more adaptable than the other commercial Linux stuff (SUSE, Ubuntu Server, etc.). CentOS is free of charge.

Below is a list of things that I go through when helping someone migrate. It’s just a checklist; if you have questions, you can ask, but this isn’t meant to be a full-blown guide.

Summary Checklist:

1. If the hardware is XP grade, stick with CentOS 6; later machines can generally run 7 just fine.

2. Install with defaults for the most part. Setup networking and lock in at least one option. For Netinstall, use both the OS package repo and the update repo from the same mirror so there’s no updating after installing.

3. Software selection: Prefer KDE with the package groups you intend to use, and perhaps development tools.

4. You need 3 good passwords; root, one user and one for the wallet/GPG key. Two more good passwords for each additional user, because each has their own wallet.

5. Add EPEL and Nux repos; there are simply too many important packages not provided by the standard repos.

6. Install adaptive stuff right away, like ntfs-3g if you use external drives for anything.

7. Run through the desktop configs and make things tolerable. Become acquainted with the interface — somewhat like Windows but far more variable and configurable. Fix Freetype (involves replacing default with altered package; it’s a good way to introduce building packages with the RPM system). Set up GPG early if needed for later.

8. Learn about special packages you might use; get to know what you need against what’s available. You may have to build some, others are provided if you know where to find them. Some of those you can build should be maintained through the RPM system; others can be simply built and installed locally. (I always offer to do this for them, sometimes taking the time to walk them through a build on their own machine. I also supply RPM packages when needed, if I can build them on my own machine.)

9. Add Google Chrome browser; Adobe Flashplayer if not using Chrome (these have their own RPM repos). Chrome uses wallet, so be ready for that the first time you try to save a password.

10. Use Thunderbird/Seamonkey for email. Evolution is only for use with a special collaboration (groupware) service. Hard-core alternative is Alpine/Mutt (commandline email applications).

11. Consider Opera-beta, Pale Moon, Slimboat, and other specialty browsers. Get used to the idea of using different browsers for different kinds of tasks and additional profiles within a browser to avoid tracking and other forms of privacy contamination.

12. If you must run Win-stuff directly, use a VM (VirtualBox), especially if only one machine is available.

13. Consider migrating to cloud services for some things: Google Docs or MS Office Online.

14. Print to PDF when possible; if you really must have a print server for paper output, you’ll have better luck with a separate Windows machine firewalled away from the Net. In general, printer manufacturers make far better drivers for Windows than for Linux. Transfer documents (via Samba client; open CentOS firewall for this) and let the Winbox print them.

15. Other networking services can be set up as needed using RHEL dox (the upstream source for CentOS) or online tutorials. There is an amazing array of industrial grade services possible on CentOS.

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