[PLUG] Whitebox to CentOS (Consider Scientific Linux)

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Mar 20 20:02:50 UTC 2007


On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 09:50:53AM -0700, William A Morita wrote:
> I saw some discussion a while back about CentOS being a better
> maintained version of RHEL than Whitebox.
> Has anyone out there done a Whitebox --> CentOS conversion?
> If so, how did it go?  Any pitfalls to be on the lookout for?

CentOS is a very well maintained clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
You should also take a look at Scientific Linux, which is Yet
Another Clone of RHEL.  The avantage of SL is that it is supported
for a Very Long Time by some full time professionals at Fermilab. 
You will have access to all the RHEL/CentOS updates while those are
available, of course, but you will also continue to get upgrades
after RHEL and CentOS have reached End-Of-Life.  The SL folks have
promised a minimum of 5 year support, but the maximum is for as
long as there is funding for Fermilab and other science labs.  


and other apps common in science academia.  Most of the big 
supercomputing arrays use SL.  This is the reason why they want very
long term support;  they don't want to redesign apps for computing
arrays or for experiment controllers.  Other than that, the
differences between SL and CentOS are quite small, and if you can
handle the shorter (but still long) support horizon for CentOS, then
CentOS might be the best bet because of the more active community. 

All RHEL clones have much longer life than Fedora, though not as
many bleeding edge goodies.  All are "Redhat-Like", meaning things
are sometimes stored in different places than Debian stores them.
Changing from Debian (Ubuntu, Knoppix) to Redhat, or to SUSE, or
to other major variants is more pain than most people want.

RHEL5, based mostly on FC6, has just been released.  CentOS 5
and SL 5 will follow soon.  I played a bit with RHEL beta 2.  As
always, some things are new and wonderful, some things are upgraded
and better, and some things are broken for the sake of perversity.
Before you upgrade, do backups first!

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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