[PLUG] CentOS 5 is cool, but ...

[John Jason Jordan]

I installed CentOS 5 amd64 on my new desktop this morning and spent
some time playing with it. Pretty cool. It found and autoconfigured
everything. I like it a lot.

There was one problem with the installation. When anaconda got to the
partitioning part I told it to create a RAID 1 partition of 20 GB to
install itself on (md2). My intention was not to disturb the Fedora 7
installation on md1. It created the partition without incident, but as
I finished the partitioning it insisted that it had to install Grub on
md2. The only other option was not to install a boot loader. I knew
what would happen if I continued and let it install Grub on md2, but I
continued anyway and, sure enough, it set up the new Grub as the one to
boot to. I think I should have told it not to install a boot loader and
then add it to the boot loader on md1. Oh well. I can fix that later.
My complaint is twofold -- 1) anaconda should have detected the
installation of Fedora 7 on md1, realized it probably had a boot
loader, and offered to add CentOS to that menu.lst and, 2) the option
not to install a boot loader should have some text with it to describe
why one might choose this option. 

So now it is running and I have it configured and stuff. It uses
2.6.18-8, which will cause the gigabit Realtek on the motherboard to
cause a kernel panic if I don't leave the Realtek disabled in the BIOS.
Fedora 7 test2 updated itself the other day to 2.6.20-something. And I
also note that CentOS 5 comes with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, where Fedora 7
and Feisty come with 2.2. 

It also failed to mount the Fedora 7 partition, but I was able to do so
manually. However, I added a line to /etc/fstab to make it mount md1 on
boot, but the line doesn't work. 

In the process of playing with it I managed to upgooberize yum. It
won't launch. From the command line I get:

There was a problem importing one of the python modules required to run
yum. The error leading to this problem was: 
No module named cElementTree
Please install a package which provides this module or verify that the
module is installed properly. It's possible that the above module
doesn't match the current version of Python, which is: 
2.4.3 (#1 March 14, 2007, 19:01:42) 
(GCC 4.1.1 20070105 (Red hat 4.1.1-52))

Well, gosh. I'd really like to install the module that yum needs except
that it seems that yum doesn't work so I can't install anything. Does
this thing come with a backup-yum or something? And does anyone have
any idea what I need to install to get yum working again? Assuming I
can figure out how to install things, should I just reinstall yum?