Although Centos is often considered a server OS (it is indeed a very good server OS), it can be used quite successfully as a desktop. In fact, I use it as one of my primary desktop OS's (the other being Debian Lenny). As of this writing, Centos 5.2 is the latest version of Centos. Because Centos is supposed to be 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this article applies to RHEL 5 as well.

For those of you who do not listen to music from other countries, this article may not have much meaning or relevance. But for those of you who do listen to international MP3 files from countries with character sets outside of standard ASCII like Japan, Korea and China, you have probably dealt with ID3 tags that display mojibake in your music player or operating system. Basically, instead of seeing the song name and artist in the appropriate language (even with the correct fonts installed), you see gibberish.