Since the "official" Redhat Enterprise Linux costs hundreds of dollars per year for updates (and to get in the first place), a group took all the code and supports it as CentOS. It's supposed to be binary/source exact with only the name/logo removed (though it still pops up in some spots here and there).

I didn't expect a whole lot in laptop support from a Redhat based distro, but this was better than I expected. The audio and mic worked out of the box. Video was ok. The desktop is the continued blueline? Gnomish desktop. I'll tell you right now, I am much prefer KDE (or almost any other desktop), and I just do not like Gnome, so that turned me off a bit. The setup was fairly easy and straightforward for the install. SELinux was VERY easy to enable (none of the other distros evaluated made it so simple). The RAID1 array I have setup between the two SATA2 hard drives in this laptop was detected and used no problem during the install. Unfortunately, Wireless was another story. RHEL, er, excuse me, CentOS didn't have any drivers and didn't even detect the ipw3945 at all. I could of easily hooked up the NIC and downloaded the drivers and firmware source, etc and compiled installed manually easily, but that would not be inline with this evals tests for a non/min-techie user. So this was a failed install.

So score so far: RHEL/CentOS 5 = Fail

Next eval coming up: Studio64...