Paolo RedaelliOne feels smart, he has written a nice DVD of CentOS 7 to be installed on his shiny new box.
Have you noticed something strange and silly in the above photo?
Right. It misses the optical drive. Actually it has only USB and Ethernet.
I felt dumb.
Dumber indeed because I cannot boot it using PXE as the DHCP is under the control of a win domain. Well, not without making a mess on the network. And I didn’t had an USB stick big enough. I’ve literally thrown away a couple hours trying to boot a minimal ISO installed on my Ext2-formatted Usb key (yes, you can format sticks with ext2!), discovering that the ISO I picked still required PXE to boot. No way. So next day I got this shiny – literally – 8Gb stick. And here I am. Centos 7 running on a “normal” Intel i3 box with 8gb of RAM which is a fairly normal spec by today’s standards, but it’s a huge jump from my previous one.
It feels weird after all those years to return to an RPM based distro. Everything looks alien and familiar at the same time.
And I already miss the huge package selection of Debian. WordPress? Isn’t there. Chrome. No way. Epiphany, the Gnome browser? Not available. That’s the price of stability, I suppose.
I haven’t already enjoyed intimacy with SE-Linux security layer. I half-suspect it won’t be an easy deal.