RHEL 4 is offered in three principal flavors by Red Hat, AS, ES, WS and desktop. CentOS (like Fedora and the legacy Red Hat Linux) is a combination of all of the above and can be installed to create just about any type of installation that you want. The install choices are: Personal Desktop, Workstation, Server, Custom, Minimal and Everything.

For the purposes of testing (and this review), I installed the "Everything" option which from the installation ISO's came in at 6268 MB. It's certainly an impressive and (very) long list of applications and packages and most users would be hard pressed to find any mainstream open source applications that are not available in the mix.

Those that are familiar with Anaconda (Red Hat's GPL'ed installer) will feel right at home. CentOS's Anaconda looks and feels like Red Hat's, without the Red Hat logo. Frankly I'm still amazed why every distro out there just doesn't use Anaconda, it's one of the best (if not the best) GUI installer for Linux ever created.

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