[PLUG] CentOS and RHEL 5 (Scientific Linux)

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Apr 24 17:51:09 UTC 2009


On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 09:47:24AM -0700, Daniel Herrington wrote:
> All,
> 
> In the thread on CentOS someone indicated that the OS is as close to a free
> version of RHEL5 as one can get.  My question is, do you have to do anything
> special with CentOS to get software that only installs on RHEL5  to install
> on CentOS?

I run a slightly different clone called Scientific Linux.  It is
also RHEL5 with the serial numbers stripped off, and is package
compatable with RHEL5 and CentOS5.  I run SL5 instead of CentOS 
because the distro is used by thousands of scientific computing
sites around the world, has a full time paid support team at
FermiLabs, and has optional packages for scientific computing;
clustering tools, scientific visualization, and the like.  I run
commercial CAD tools targeted for RHEL on it without problems.

The most attractive aspect of SL is that it has very long term
support;  FermiLabs is still providing package updates for
installations running SL3 ( RHEL3).  Some very big compute
jobs run on superclusters for years - they don't stop them
to upgrade distros.  The down side is that you don't get
the latest/greatest hardware drivers with this approach. 
RHEL5 / SL5 resembles Fedora Core 6 .  However, if you are
running server/desktop hardware, or older laptops, this will
work just fine. 

If RedHat offered such long term package upgrades and support,
I wouldn't mind paying their license fees;  although SL is free
as in beer (and freedom), that is not its prime attraction. 
But I don't like to be forced to upgrade distros merely because
Red Hat stopped providing package updates for the distro I am
happy with.  I have better things to do than upgrade distros.

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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