I promise not to install any other distro of Linux directly onto my notebook anymore. I promise to keep CentOS as the base OS for my notebook. I promise that any other Linux distro tinkering will happen within VMware Server. Today, for some stupid reason, I had an itching to try SUSE Linux 10.1 out again. It was the first Linux distro I installed onto this Compaq Evo N600c when I got it and I guess I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Boy, was that a mistake to give SUSE Linux 10.1 another shot. The install of software was slow. The configuration was really, really slow. The ISOs that are up for download have a terrible bug where a machine will never think it is out-of-date -- so no security updates are ever applied. The package manager in SUSE Linux 10.1 just plain sucks -- it is slow, it is buggy, and it is borderline unusable. Never again will I try SUSE Linux 10.1 on real hardware. I may install it into a virtual machine, but it will never touch real hardware again. I went through the CentOS install again and it was quite painless. Reconfiguring wasn't bad either. And the part that took the longest was updating the software. I think that CentOS (aka Red Hat Enterprise Linux) runs so well and is so stable that it gets kind of "boring" or "mudane" after a while. That is because it just works. It doesn't crash. And once it is setup, it is setup and ready to work. So, no matter how bored I get with CentOS (in this case bored is a good thing), I will not install over it another Linux distro. I have to remind myself that CentOS4 is not old. It looks old when compared to Linux distros that get updated every 3 to 6 months (like Fedora), but the 18 month upgrade cycle of CentOS is not long. Heck, CentOS4 was released March 1, 2005. It is a baby when compared to Windows XP which was released October 25, 2001! I have to stop wasting time reimaging my notebook all the time. Any other Linux distro will have to live a contained life within a virtual machine. Red Hat just released their Update 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. I can't wait until the CentOS team gets the new CentOS 4.4 ISOs up.