[Lug-nuts] centOS

I decided to give CentOS 9.2..... a try. Overall, it was a pretty good experience, but took a lot of time. Or more than it could have. I decided to burn the iso to a CD. Turns out, the "new" systems CD drive doesn't work. Not being that familiar with EFI/boot it took a while to figure this out. So, I did a USB drive iso/boot. This seems a lot easier than the last time I did this. Just dd the iso over to the USB. Everything worked. I installed the XFCE alternative. I didn't realize that this put me back at 9.2X instead of at 10.X. The qemu dnf install had issues. The main binary, qemu-kvm gets installed in a directory that is off the path. I put a link on the path to it. It works. But this is the lame stuff I was hoping to get away from by not using Fedora. This has to be a known issue and it would be nice if it was fixed. I would think qemu is a pretty popular package. Or is a directory named libexec supposed to be on the path now because there just weren't any good spots on the path we already have? My plan is to run the new box headless and just vnc into it. I thought this would require Xvnc and some set up. I did this, it works. But I wanted to run a VM on the box. It took a little bit to rewrite my batch file to get things right. After installing a vnc viewer, I could see that it was running, using the Xvnc display :1, which is how I set it up. But I also noticed that the commandline output was telling me that a vnc server was running on 5900. Turns out, I don't need all the Xvnc stuff. Just SSH in and start the VM and access port 5900 and I have a really nice vnc session. Almost like I am running the VM on the VNC client. This was nice. Route and ifconfig are finally gone, so I had to learn ip. Man pages are, again, grouped and written in a unique way. Eventually found what I needed. Default routing was set up with the wrong gateway. Fixed that with ip, but the old gateway kept coming back. Network configs have been moved and changed again. Found some docs online/Google and started unknowingly down an old path. Fortunately, they were nice enough to put a readme file in that directory telling me where the new stuff is. Now it's time to configure the firewall. I've done this before with nft. Despite Googling the exact error message, telling me that the operation was not permitted,I got exactly zero exact hits. I've been running this exact command for years and never had a problem. It's hard for me to believe that reflects the actual data/web. While the wording on the hits was similar, the results were really unrelated. So, I started going through the nft documentation. What a slog. I was focused on the fact that "firewalld" was underlined in the error message. I found stuff on table ownership in the man page. Spent a lot of time. Then I started to play around with firewalld. Which I just happened to know was more than a namespace in nft, which is all the man page tells you. I finally found firewall-cmd. Which is, apparently, what I was "supposed" to be using all along. It does make things easier. Especially if the persist functionality works as advertised. A push in the right direction is nice. I kick in the pants, less so. So they changed the nft-firewalld relationship somehow. I'm really surprised that Google turned up nothing on this when I searched the error. I guess I should have read the release notes. Maybe there is something there. Oh, where are they? In the end, it all makes sense and I'm up and running. A "few" years back, I attributed the amount of time this all took to being just young and inexperienced. Now that I'm old and stupid, I realize it is either a natural, or artificially created, barrier to entry. No one is going to tell you or make it easy. You have to spend the time, and that is the way the world likes it. In summary, while I have a positive impression of CentOS so far, the distros, man pages and Google search results have all gone downhill from days not that far gone by. Maybe that was the peak. Complexity on everything has gone up. All this starts to erode the benefits of open source IMHO. It's a receipe for disaster in the long run. -Gary It is a simple thing to make things complex, a complex thing to make things simple.