[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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