Just out of curiosity, what version of Centos was that?
Also (you may know this or not), but RH backports fixes to stuff, so the first couple of nums in a kernel version aren't definitive of its age.
Simlarly for other SW.

@pdxmusl

How about Arch? It just installs to a bare minimum working system (with no GUI). You can add all the packages you want to customize it, and all of the packages are not modified except if they otherwise wouldn't work right (unlike other distros which tend to want to modify and brand every package they can lay their hands on).

I'm was testing out 5.5. I may still go back to it. I wasn't completely aware that stuff gets back ported. But the kernal it's using can be found in distros from 2006. It may be heavily modified. That's fine. It makes sense really, given what it's intended to be used for. Which is long term stability. But there were a lot of issues I had in centos that I was having back in the early 2000's. Which.. getting reintroduced to linux after so many years... wasn't very encouraging. Linux is community driven, and hopefully one day I'll make some positive contributions. So.. not expecting all my thrown together old hardware to immediately start working. I expect to and have had to tweak something in every distro i've tested. I'm fine with that else I wouldn't be doing it. But to be honest, given the ages of the hardware I am using. I expected the majority of the tweaking would be downloading and configuring new drivers. If they didn't exist... i'd know I needed to write one, or replace the hardware with something that does have drivers. Instead.... I found drivers but they weren't compatible with the kernal. It was too old or needed serious config file changes.. I realize I can up grade the kernel if I want, and have done so in the past. But... not really interested in doing that right out of the box.

Right now I'm testing ubuntu. I tried fedora, but twice in the same day, fedora forgot my password and I wasn't able to log in (and I really mean fedora forgot my password.) Theres a work around of course, but that quickly turned me off.

You may actually find that the RHEL / Centos kernels are
pretty much the same as what you find in Ubuntu or other
bigger distros. They just have a somewhat weird naming
convention - everything is being patched and back-ported
into what *appears* to be 2.6.18 .... in fact, some kernel
development is actually done (and hence super-current) by
RedHat employees.



Cheers,
Tink

Arch i haven't tried yet. Nor have I done much research on it. I do want a gui though. I kind of want to get out of the 80's and buzz off my mullet. Don't get me wrong. I love the command line prompt. And in linux, I probably use it more often than not, But.... entering the new millennium now... I do expect some pretty pictures while playing around in linux. If I so choose to use the command line... it better be there. But.... I would still classify myself as a linux newbie. If i'm setting up my machine and trying to config some obscure setting. Unless I do a bunch of research on it, i probably am not going to find it in the billion config files linux has. However, if it's accessible through the gui, I'll find it in seconds or minutes.

Anyway, I have an older system I'm testing things out on. The intent here is that eventually I'd upgrade my system with more modern hardware. But .. I want to know what distributions I like first. That way I can select my new hardware to what works best with the distribution I like. Generally, linux distrubutions probably have a common set of hardware they are compatible with. Some things, again, need more tweaking than others. But with the right distro in combination with the right hardware selection. I can just install... and boot.... and not worry about it. These parts here... are just for abusing.

Possible, but.. as an example.. there was a driver I attempted to install. The only available driver would not work with the kernal centos was using. Perhaps there was some configuration I needed to do and did not know about. I did search for several days on solutions. That's when I started paying attention to the version numbers. The driver required a kernal version number greater than what I had. (to be fiar, this was the first problem I attempted to solve in linux in about 10 years. Right out of the box, so... if I were to search now, perhaps I'd find a solution). Point is.. I couldn't get it to work. However... just about ever other distro i've used, the driver just works or is already included without funky configuration issues. I realize what I'm about to say is simplistic at best, but pretty much the main difference between the distributions is the kernal. Again, centos' kernel may be a heavily modified version of it, but you can go and check out other distros from back in 2006. See what kernal they were using then. And lo and behold, the kernal Centos is using is at least based off of the same kernal from 4~5 years ago.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to rip centos. Or red hats accomplishments. I know they've contributed to the kernal. I actually liked centos quite a bit. Dispite it being a pain for me to setup my hardware. That's why, like I say, I might go back to it. All I'm saying is that it required a lot more effort for me to setup. Even though the hardware I have has been around for at least 5 years. And other distributions.. the general trend has not been that way. So.. even though I've been suggesting it. I know it's not "just the kernel". That's too simplistic of an answer.

I think at this point. I need to get back into the linux world with something a little more friendly. So.. trying other distros right now. But had centos not been such a pain with my older hardware... I wouldn't have considered testing out other distros.

How about telling us what the HW/driver you wanted to install is?

@pdxmusl

Yes, Arch doesn't have a GUI. But you can install X.org plus any desktop of your choice using the package manager once you successfully installed Arch.

See the newbies' guide at the ArchWiki.

I could.... if that was currently a problem. I'm not running centos any more. And if I decide to go back too it, I'll definitely investigate it more thoroughly... if I don't have completely different hardware at that point.

I wasn't bringing up my point as an issue to be solved. I was merely stating current experience and information I've found out.

Well.. ok, yeah, You can probably add a gui to any distro. Some probably pose larger challenges than others. For the experience, at some point, I would like to build a linux box from complete scratch. Hand pick the kernal etc.. I think that would be a lot of fun. But right now I'm not really looking for that much of a challenge as I build my linux box. Call me lazy if you will, but at this point, the more things that just work right out of the box wins points from me. I have no doubt I'll become quite skilled at causing issues... intentional or not :D