There are several ways of getting help in CentOS as summarized on the Wiki Help page. The most commonly used CentOS-provided venues are the mailing lists and the forums. However, when people encounter problems or simply want to find out some information, they most likely just go to google.

I performed some searches on google for commonly used terms with the “site:centos.org” added and then counted the number of hits that pointed to the mailing lists (M/L) and did the same for the forums.  The result is summarized below. Assuming most people will not go through many pages, I collected the results from the first 50 links (that’s 5 pages with the default of 10 per page).


Search term   M/L Forums
============  === ======
install         0   21
installation    0    4
kernel         10   11
driver(s)       3   24
DNS            11   29
postfix        19   20
sendmail       22   16
selinux         5   10
apache          0   23
httpd           6   30
xen            38    7
kickstart      20   12
crash          16   11
panic          10   19


While I do not claim this is a representative result, I do notice that the forum posts tend to be found more often than the M/L posts. One notable exception (among this small set of searches) was “xen” — most of them were from the centos-virt mailing list (what else do you expect? 🙂 ).

Also, I am not trying to compare the significance/importance of the two help channels, either. I only want to emphasize the fact that, in the age of google everything, many users come to read those posts and, therefore, we need to maintain the contents of the posts as accurate as we can.

I’ve heard about a plan to merge postings from both channels into a single database.  That would become a valuable souce for all CentOS users.

Last year, we saw many people who migrated to CentOS. There is no doubt we have many more CentOS “newcomers” this year. There are basically two types of CentOS newbies.

One is former/current Windows users who just want to see what Linux looks like or who are seriously considering saying goodbye to the blasted OS. These people need a lot of help but, as far as they are eager to learn, it’s not difficult to provide assistance.

The other type is those who have been using other distros for some time. They tend to demand the latest and the greatest version of everything. It is often necessary to explain all about an enterprise-class distro, stability and backporting. A recent post in the CentOS forum is from a person of such type:

“I guess I will go with a more updated and modern O/S.
Centos must be years behind other O/S”

Another concept that is often not so obvious among the CentOS newcomers is the package-based management. As soon as they find out their favorite application is not available or obsolete, they want to install it from source. Let me pull some example again from a recent post in the forums (with a slight adjustment):

“I was thinking removing the original version (e.g. yum remove glibc) and install the new version using /usr/local as the root path could be a better solution for the system stability.”

This poster is even talking about the stability ! However, this is not a laughing matter. We should all get busy and provide proper guidance to people who are serious about doing the migration.

Welcome to the CentOS community !

Jim Perrin put an impressive ASCII Christmas tree on Planet CentOS.  This reminded me of my own very old ASCII snowman I used to place in motd of a Solaris workstation during holiday seasons.

-rw-r-----   1 yagi2    yagi         661 Dec 17  1998 holi

$cat holi

                _XXX_      .    .       .  .    .  .   .     .  .
               / """ \    .    .    .   .      . .    .   .      .
              {  0 0  3         .  .     .     .     .        .
              {   <   3    .  .    *** HAPPY HOLIDAYS ***   .   .
               \  V  /      .  .  .  .    .   .    ..   .   . .   .
               &&&&&&&    ..   . .     .     .  .     .     .   .
              /    &  \       .    ..    .  .  .   .    .     .
             /    &    \    .   .     .    .  .  ..    .   .    .
            BB   &    )))     .   .      .     .    .     .  .     .
            \          /
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

CentOS Wiki is filled with information and is one of the most frequently used resources available to CentOS users. But, little known is its statistics page:

http://wiki.centos.org/PageHits

According to Ralph, this page is created through a macro called “PageHits” but not all the details as to how this works are known. Anyway, let’s take a look at some of the top entries as of Dec 05, 2008.

This page shows how often a page was requested since the beginning of
logging. It has no intelligence, every view counts as hit.

 1. 732352 FrontPage
 2. 268550 HowTos
 3. 263042 Repositories
 4. 217961 Repositories/RPMForge
 5. 158478 TipsAndTricks
 6. 136617 FAQ
 7. 112780 HowTos/JavaOnCentOS
 8. 105514 FAQ/CentOS5
 9. 104275 HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU
10. 102457 Repositories/CentOSPlus
11.  88726 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.1
12.  77033 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.0
13.  64338 PackageManagement/Yum
14.  64289 HowTos/Custom Kernel
15.  59413 HowTos/I need the Kernel Source
16.  58947 PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities
17.  57351 Manuals
18.  56419 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.2
19.  54229 HowTos/FreeNX
20.  49854 HowTos/PackageManagement/YumOnRHEL
21.  48016 FAQ/General
22.  42976 TipsAndTricks/NTFSPartitions
23.  42750 HowTos/Network/IPTables
24.  41817 TipsAndTricks/YumAndRPM
25.  41442 RecentChanges
26.  40885 HowTos/Nagios
27.  40669 GettingHelp
28.  40373 HowTos/Subversion
29.  37791 TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares
30.  30907 TipsAndTricks/Xen
32.  28906 TipsAndTricks/KickStart
33.  28127 FAQ/CentOS4
34.  27719 HowTos/MigrationGuide/ServerCD 4.4 to 5
35.  27660 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.1/Japanese
36.  26997 TipsAndTricks/VMWare Server
37.  26659 HardwareList


no intelligence … Hmmm, sounds familiar?  Let’s do some analysis. Not so surprisingly, the FrontPage is by far the most often visited page. Also, I knew that the Repositories article was very popular, and that indeed seems to be the case. Things like FAQ or ReleaseNotes are expected to get a lot of hits. What was interesting to me (as a Japanese) was that, among the localized ReleaseNotes, the Japanese version ranked No,1.  This is either because there are so many CentOS users in Japan or the Japanese people do not want to read English (or both).

The kernel-related pages are also well visited despite the fact custome kernels are not supported by the CentOS team.  Alan‘s efforts among others are well paid for.  Ned‘s IPTables is quite popular, too.  Note this page is relatively young compared to others.

My own small contributions, NTFS and WindowsShares, are listed there indiating a good number of CentOS users still stuck with the other OS.

It is rather an old trick – adding a color to your prompt.  But it was resurrected when someone asked a question on a CentOS forum:

“how can I change color of root@localhost inside console????”

After some cheerful exchange, it turned out that this person wanted to know how to color the root’s prompt.  As usual, a nice team work of regular helpers (especially between Alan and Ned) brought about colorful answers.

In fact, making the root’s prompt a colorful one is indeed a good idea.  It reminds you of the root status in a much nicer way than the usual # prompt.  I put in my root’s ~/.bashrc the following:
export PS1="\[\e[31;1m\][\u@\[\e[34;1m\]\H \W]# \[\e[0m\]"
This gives me  [root@apollo ~]# which, in a way, has some American touch.  Hmmm.

This is all good for bash.  However, my own acount uses (t)csh.  Not to worry.  csh supports colors, too.  For example, putting this line in the .login file (one line):
set prompt =
"\[%{\033[32m%}%n@%{\033[34m%}`echo $cwd`%{\033[0m%}\]$ "
produces  [toracat@/home/toracat]$

I also have an alias for “cd” (one line):
alias cd 'cd \!* ; set prompt =
"\[%{\033[32m%}%n@%{\033[34m%}`echo $cwd`%{\033[0m%}\]$ "'
to get a consistent look (csh again).

Why is this good for CentOS? You can see it in the original CentOS thread:

The person who asked the question was so happy with the help he received that he decided to make a donation to CentOS.  What really helped here was the “please donate” message in the Ned‘s signature.  🙂