I am leaning towards using Centos 4.4 for a server I am setting up but I wanted to know if there are any issues I need to be aware of given the hardware is state of the art and post dates the release of Centos 4.4. I posted a thread on this topic in another forum but didn't get many responses. Since Centos is effectively RHEL 4 I am posting here in hopes of getting more input.

I have already downloaded the complete set of CDROM for the the distribution but I would like to know if there are other packages or drivers I will need to obtain given the the newer hardware.

The machine:
Intel Core Duo Processor E6400
4GB of dual channel DDR2 SDRAM
256 nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
1TB performance RAID 0 (2 x 500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM HDDs)
16x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW)
Integrated 7.1 channel audio

I believe the machine comes configured as a RAID 0 but I will want to switch that over to a RAID 1 configuration. The machine should be arriving today and I am hoping to get it up and running over the weekend.

Also, is it true the Centos does not come with a GUI interface? Since I will use this machine as a workstation on occasion I would like to have the GUI as well.

Thanks for the help.

I'm running Centos 4.4 on quite a few boxen. The only issue I had with installing it on a brand new box was the scsi drivers. The kernel is slightly old, but I was able to download the drivers from the manufacutres website and load them from floppy.

The kicker was the drivers were updated in a newer kernel version, but what do you do.

Other than that it's been running great.

I have installed Centos 4.4 on this machine and it is not booting. It gets as far as the BIOS boot and stops at the point where the option to go into the RAID configuration. Once it reaches that point I get no further output or information to indicate the status of what is happening. Prior to installation I reconfigured the system to use RAID 1 rather than RAID 0. This change resulted in blowing away all of the preinstalled software (which is not that big of an issue since I am loading Centos).

When I installed I included X windows and the KDE desktop. I am wondering if the issue has to do with the video driver. Should I install the system as a command line only with the bare minimum of video support, install updated nVida drivers and then install the remaining packages?

Would anyone have an idea why the system just hangs right off the bat. Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE: I have tried installing the bare minimum system and the system still hangs during the boot process with no indication of what the problem is. I only get as far as the BIOS stating that I need to hit (CRTL-I) to configure the RAID controller. Following this message three periods are printed and then the system hangs.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

My thought is that the CentOS install CD isn't/doesn't have the driver for your raid controller. One way to check would be to download another Live CD and see if that will allow you to see the hard disk.

You could use Knoppix, Fedora Live CD (I think there's one), Ubuntu, or the Gentoo live cd. Once you have a live cd booted I'd open a terminal and do a lsmod to see which drivers are loaded also a lspci to get a list of hardware.

Once you have that you might try your raid controller manufacturer's website to see if they have linux drivers available. If you post your hardware specs I could lend a hand.

UPDATE: I decided to install FC6 instead. The system is now up and running, although now I have to get all the services configured.

Thanks for the assistance.