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 [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
