by Rick Jerz.
Gary, you should consider installing VMWare on your Mac for this kind of experimenting, unless others here on moodle.org think it's a waste of time.
On my Mac, I have had a CentOS virtual computer for about a half year. I don't do much with it (yet), but it appears to be a full version of CentOS.
Then, based upon your success with Ubuntu, I decided to install a virtual Ubuntu VMWare computer. It took about 15 minutes, and now I also have a Ubuntu computer in my Mac.
The beauty of these virtual computers is that you can experiment and learn, and it is easy to go back to earlier versions.