Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

Finally, I decided to go and download Cent OS so I could try it out for my Network Installation Project. You can access the download section here at this page . At first when I saw the size I was kind of pessimistic if this was going to happen anytime this year. I couldn’t have been any more wrong, I managed to get speeds above 150 kbps for their downloads which is the fastest speeds I have had yet (329 kbps).  Anyway I managed to get the 32 bit of the distro very fast.

Next task was installing Virtualbox. So I went ahead and entered the following command.

pacman -S virtualbox

After confirming the download and installing it I followed the instructions which I found here on the ArchWiki. Once Virtualbox was installed I configured it for the installation of Cent OS (Red Hat).  Next I burned the ISO I downloaded onto a DVD for backup purposes and then inserted the Disk and checked if I was able to start the Installation. As soon as I started the installation I was greeted by the Cent OS GUI Installer. Continued with the Installation and choose the Option for Server and with the Gnome GUI. Further selected server services like Apache, Samba etc as this was going to help me with my Network Install project.

Heres a picture of my Arch Linux desktop with Cent OS 5.2 Running in VirtualBox.

I noticed one thing though, the mouse seemed not to be captured till I went to Devices > Install Guest Additions. Although I’m not sure why that actually fixed it or it wasn’t working in the first place. Now its time for me to get my hands dirty and goof around on the server and prepare for setting up this on our Windows Network :).

The college I go to has assigned me with the task of fixing their network. Well actually they want me to fix a Lab which has around 15 Prehistoric Computers and 3 average systems. The main objective the teachers would like to get accomplished is to have a network where all students files are located on a central server. At the moment each students just logs on to whatever system he / she wants and just saves all the files to the local hard disk. Further they would like a bulletin board or message board sort of facility included which would allow them to post messages to a group of students or issue Homework questions and other notices .

Well after proper consideration I’ve decided to give Cent Os 5.2 a try on the network. Not only is the operating system free but it has the features that the staff we’re looking for. So I decided to download it from one of the torrents which you can find here. While downloading it I noticed that i got speeds in excess of 100 Kbps easily so the download didn’t take alot of time either. Although the server is going to be Linux based I’m still keeping the systems as WIndows XP or Windows 2000, If I feel the old systems are too weak to run them then I’ll probably even give Arch a whirl on them. I’ll be sure to update my progress here.