Installer and Installation Process: CentOS uses the Anaconda installer, the same installer used by Fedora and several other Linux distributions. However, the version of Anaconda on CentOS 6 is at least two revisions behind the version used on Fedora 15, the latest stable edition of Fedora. It has support for LVM, RAID, and disk encryption.
The installer makes it extremely easy to configure disk encryption, and because LVM is the default disk partitioning scheme, choosing the disk encryption option and sticking with the default installation mode is the same thing as configuring encrypted LVM. Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu (the alternate text-installer, not the Live CD version) are other Linux distributions with support for creating encrypted LVM installations.
Installed and Available Applications: A default desktop installation of CentOS 6 features an application set that will not meet the desktop computing needs of most users. Remember, however, that you could customize what is installed during the installation process. And of course, more applications can be installed afterwards. Aside from the standard stock set of system utilities and desktop accessories, here are some notable applications installed: Firefox is the only non-text browser installed, and it is the only one in the repository. And without a Flash or Java plugin installed, Firefox is no fun to use. In fact, many of the applications that would make the system usable, are not even in the repository. Enabling third-party repositories, like RPMFusion and Elrepo are your best bets, if you want to have access to applications not in the default repositories. Software Management: Yum, Yellowdog Updater Modified, is the preferred command line software manager for CentOS 6, and the installed graphical package manager is Gpk-Application. Starting it does not require authentication, but that is, of course, a requirement before any application can be installed. Out of the box, the system is configured to check for updates daily, and the update notification application works. These are the default repositories on a default installation of CentOS 6 desktop. Applications from these are mostly outdated.
