Installation

No biggy, choose your version and correct platform. I usually go to distrowatch to get an overview of the distribution versions. I choose version 5 of CentOS for x86_64 to install. Downloaded the iso images to a USB disk and burned the netinstal iso to a rewritable mini CD. Boot and USB disk is mounted automatically. You do not have a shell with netinstall and cannot browse the filesystems so you need to know the location of the iso images by haert, mine are on sdb1 in iso/. Installation is easy, I select virtualization and server GUI package groups and will remove/install more packages after first boot using yum.

Trouble in paradise

After first boot I selected some packages to be removed and dependecy did breake my Gnome desktop to find my system falling back to twm. In /var/log/messages I found 'GConf server is not in use, shutting down' and find that startx is eventually using /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients to start Gnome, first line says: 'GSESSION="$(which gnome-session 2>/dev/null)"'. See below:

 
[root@vimpc ~]# which gnome-session
/usr/bin/which: no gnome-session in ...
[root@vimpc ~]# yum list | grep gnome-session
gnome-session.x86_64                     2.16.0-6.el5.centos    base            
[root@vimpc ~]# yum list installed | grep gnome-session
[root@vimpc ~]# yum install gnome-session.x86_64
...
Dependencies Resolved
=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size 
=============================================================================
Installing:
 gnome-session           x86_64     2.16.0-6.el5.centos  base              413 k
Installing for dependencies:
 control-center          x86_64     1:2.16.0-14.el5  base              2.7 M
 evolution-data-server   x86_64     1.8.0-25.el5     base              3.4 M
 gnome-panel             x86_64     2.16.1-6.el5     base              3.3 M
...
Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      6 Package(s)         

Yes i did select evolution-data-server for removal after first boot :*(

 
[root@vimpc ~]# which gnome-session
/usr/bin/gnome-session

It works again!

Synergy (and other packages)

Because we are using Windows laptops at work i wanted to switch smootly between Windows and my Linux desktop. For this i need a package that is not in the default repository: Synergy. Downloading it from the site i found a i386 package which can work for me becourse i am using AMD64 and can run both 64 and 32bit applications. When installing with rpm i encountered the dependency for 'libstdc++-libc6.2*', I am at a lower lever (so it seems). But instead of providing the dependency i searched for a other 64bit package at my frieds site DAG and fount it worked perfectly:

 
[root@vimpc download]# rpm -Uvh synergy-1.3.1-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm 
warning: synergy-1.3.1-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:synergy                ########################################### [100%]

Okay lets use DAG's packages in all thier glory:

 
$ rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
$ yum list extras
$ yum install fluxbox.x86_64