Bought new desktop, installation of CentOS 5.0, first problems

Bought Athlon 64 desk (<400 usd) and 19" wide monitor (~210 USD).
all on Asus hardware

Now CentOS 5.0 x64 is installing on it.

Installation is smooth, however very different from Debian based distributions.

By default selected all types from list (Desktop KDE, Desktop GUI, Server, Server GUI, Cluster ... )

Left some space on device for further playing with different file systems.

First problems:
a) It requires login and password of user on first boot , and I cannot switch from local encoding .
skip user addition (to install further).
b) No network after install on fresh machine.
(to compare,
Xubuntu 7.10 livecd detected network and internet without any effort)

In Gnome Network Preferences, no any adapter installed.

However it a lot of fun staff from the box (like sftp , and one virtual machine running).

Overall expression : Amazing thing, but need some work to make it working with such basic things as Internet.