CentOS

“CentOS is an enterprise-class Linux distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor’s redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork).”

Origin – Home Page: USA – CentOS

Desktop: None by default. CentOS is a server-oriented distro

Price: Free to use and distribute. Open Source.

Comments: As with that “prominent North American enterprise Linux vendor” from which it is derived, CentOS supports LVM, and it is the default partitioning scheme. Currently it supports x86 and x86_64 systems. Support for ia64 (Itanium),PowerPC, and SPARC platforms is underway.

CentOS is a server distro, which means that you don’t get an X window after installation. However like all Linux distros, it is fairly easy to transform a CentOS server to a desktop. In the case of CentOS, use yum as detailed here

Download/Buy: You may download CentOS iso images or buy CDs.

Tutorials/Tips: Access CentOS docs