If you need to practice on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution but don’t have the cash to play with an official Red Hat version, what are you going to do? You’re going to look for an affordable (FREE) alternative solution. The solution is CentOS, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System. To find a quick overview of CentOS, visit the wikipedia CentOS site.
The official CentOS website is http://www.centos.org.
My initial experience with installation and configuration was very positive. The user interface was easy to use. I found many tutorials about CentOS installation and configuration online. These tutorials were very helpful and had step by step directions with useful screen-shots.
Tutorials:
- How To Forge – http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/linux/centos
- CentOS Wiki – http://wiki.centos.org/
- YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centos
Example CentOS tutorial topics:
- LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server
- Email (POP, SMTP)
- DNS
- Directory Service
- WebDAV
- FTP
- Firewall
- Squid Proxy server
- Virtualization
- ISPConfig
