I’ve lapsed quite a bit on trying new distributions of Linux as they come out, and with Red Hat 7.x coming out I figured it was time to get up off my duff and dig into a new distro! With text installation of course, I can’t stand GUI installations.
Of course being that I have no direct link to any RHEL 7.x installation, I had to use CentOS 7.x which I know is slightly different. That being said, I’m quite impressed.
During boot when the boot screen appears I hit escape, being dumped to the LILO prompt. I then typed “linux text”, and on to the text installation procedure it went!
CentOS 7.x went back to the Unix roots it seems, losing the curses style interface and bringing a more text-only style. Selecting a number of a displayed text menu would draw a submenu. It was dead simple to install, walking 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and installation happened. Of course a little self control is necessary and knowing which number comes after the other. Also, reading is necessary, which seems to be hard for some admins.
The nice part I noticed is the integration of virtualization into the installation, allowing you to choose that the server will be a virtualization server, hosting others via QEmu or Virtualbox through the KVM interfacing. I haven’t experimented with the quality of virtualization, however.
Of note is the fact that the normal chkconfig tool that set the precedence of the /etc/init.d files (and whether they ran or not) is now not the tool of use. It looks like Red Hat has replaced the /etc/init.d idea with their own systemd interface. I’m not sure how it ties together, but a command systemctl is the interface to showing what functions are running at boot or different runlevels, along with whether they run. I’m not sure where the files are located, but I do know that /etc/rc.d/init.d/* is handled in a legacy fashion. Also, IPv6 is handled during installation, which is nice if you have an IPv6 network.
Mind you, the information I gleaned from CentOS 7.x was with a 15-30 minute installation/messing-around then off to do other things. That means I’m obviously low on the totem pole as far as experience with it currently.
The Sociopathic Mind of a Certified Eclectic 