I was thinking of trying fedora (maybe the new core 5)again on my workstation at work. Currently I'm running CentOS 4.3 on the workstation, which is fine but applications are pretty old. The problem I had before with Fedora was repositories

If I had any combination of these unofficial ....livna,dag,dries,freshrpms etc..., my system would break alot during or after updates


From your experiences what unofficial repositories would you all suggest to use if any at all

Don't mix too many repos and your system will be fine. Some repos seem to be notorius for replacing some system packages which can cause problems later. I can't remember exactly which they are, but if you go to fedoraforums.org, there is an article there about this.

First, what problems (if any) are you having with CentOS-4.3 other then you think the applications are old???? If you want newer applications some are easy and some are a bit harder to install into CentOS-4.3, do you have any in mind you really need/want????

For example (just downloaded/installed from http://www.openoffice.org/ );

$ rpm -qa --queryformat="%{n}-%{v}-%{r}.%{arch}.rpm\n" 'openoffice*'
openoffice.org-core03-2.0.2-5.i586.rpm
openoffice.org-core10-2.0.2-5.i586.rpm
openoffice.org-spellcheck-2.0.2-5.i586.rpm
openoffice.org-core08-2.0.2-5.i586.rpm
<snip, you get the idea>

In answer your question, I perfer to keep the unoffical repos really small just dags repo. But at the same time I'm used to downloading and building rpms if needed from the source when I desire a newer application.

CentOS is just fine with Dag..I have it on 3 Dell Poweredge Servers...works great! However I would like to try a newer evolution Mail suite on the desktop hoping it will be a faster(yes I connect to a M$ Exchange server ). Also I want to see what RHEL5 will have to offer by trying core 5

Plus the idea of tryin something shiny and new (core 5) seems pretty neat

I will test core 5 with Dag on another machine and see how things go. Thanks for the help folks.

May I suggest that you wait a bit (a few weeks maybe) before trying FC5, it seems not enough testing has gone into the release, two more updates for it today; http://lwn.net/Articles/176443/

One of the main reasons I changed from FC4 to CentOS myself was all of the bad/broken updates with FC4, I got tired of having to update the update, the one that finally convinced me to switch was the fubar with an xorg update.