I had an old laptop that was very sluggish with WinXP. I decided to use it to learn more about linux and see what I could do. I partitioned the hard disk to allow the use of three distributions on the disk in a multi-boot setup.

I decided I wanted one partition each for Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat. I had always had the best experience with Slackware derivatives and it was what I usually used to get a Linux system up and running, using Vector Linux as my favorite distro. I had rarely used any Debian derivatives and after having some success with some old PPC/Mac hardware I decided to use Lubuntu on this laptop. It works fine.

When I got to the Red Hat partition I first tried PCLinuxOS. I couldn't get it to work. Then I tried Fedora. I had a little more success but I was stuck at version 16 and could not upgrade the system. Then I started looking at CentOS. I wasn't sure how a "server" oriented distro would work for me since I want to set up a typical "desktop" system on this old hardware. I found out that CentOS 6 and 7 would probably require a PAE capable CPU and I think this Celeron M processor is not able to do that (Although I am not sure exactly what that all means).

I successfully installed CentOS 5.2 from an old DVD I had and then updated it to 5.11. I was impressed that I now had a fairly modern browser in Firefox 31. Vector Linux does not have this newer version. although I was able to update Firefox to somewhere around 22, I think. All in all CentOS 5 seems to be pretty modern for this old laptop and runs much better than WinXP.

But I must say that CentOS, and the Red Hat distros in general, have been a lot harder for me to work in. It has taken a lot more work and experimenting to get things set up the way I am used to. I guess this is because RH is designed to secure and is not easily manipulated by newbies. Reading in the forums is much harder as it seems the RH community expects users to understand what is being said/typed without having to spell it out. This has made it a challenge for me to get CentOS more usable on this old hardware.

Still, I am delighted to learn that I can have a Red Hat derivative on this laptop along with the Slackware and Debian varieties. This is making it nicer to learn all on one machine instead of having to set up a desktop. I was getting worried when I was trying PCLinuxOS and Fedora that this laptop was not going to work with RH. CentOS seems to be the ticket.

I just managed to get the wireless working. Now I am going to work on the display drivers. This laptop uses 1280x800 but this CentOS cuts off the bottom line unless I set it to 1280x768. I will post some questions about how to go about fixing this in another thread.

Anyone else using CentOS on a laptop? as a typical desktop system, instead of a server?

Sean

RedHat has different licensing, but not different software for server, desktop, and laptop. IT is a single OS. In other words, your CentOS is not technically a "Server Version" any more than the others. It depends upon what you install that is not installed by default to make it 'your' system.

I think you have an excellent selection there. I might have gone with Arch over Slack, but either way should be fun.

CentOS started out in 800x600 on my screen. I used the Display Settings in the Gnome GUI to set hardware to an LCD panel 1280x800. Then I set the resolution to 1280x768. Now everything is good. That was easy.

I know that CentOS is for Enterprise applications. But I think this is a fine desktop system, so far, for everyday use. As long as the needs of the user is simple office applications and mostly text based browsing. If I was going for a media center or wanted to watch lots of Youtube, etc. this might not be as easy to use as Lubuntu. But my purpose is mostly for learning and testing and I'm finding myself liking how CentOS does things.

Next I'll check out sound.

Sean

I'm typing this from a Laptop running CentOS 7. I moved this box over from Arch (actually a couple times) because Arch simply wouldn't stay running though it ran fine on my desktop. I've had a LOT of pain tuning this into a desktop oriented OS but it's there and I couldn't be happier. Wednesday of last week I migrated my desktop over to CentOS from Arch with pretty much the same setup. The tansition has taken me months but it's done.