Friday, June 17, 2011

An Open Source version of RedHat Enterprise Linux

I have been looking for other alternatives which mimics or offers free version of Enterprise OS like RedHat Enterprise Linux. Two of them have been found so far, like CentOS and Scientific Linux.

RHEL6 has been released for a while but CentOS didn't quite catch up with the latest version of RHEL, so I turned to use Scientific Linux which has version 6 now. Also, the fancy of SL6 may be due to its support by famous national laboratories around the world, such as Fermilab and CERN. These labs are working on high energy physics and make use of SL6 inside their IT infrastructure.

SL6 is actually rebuilt from the source RPMs of RHEL6. People are working on security fixes and put them upstream back to RedHat repository. This makes SL6 binary compatible with RHEL6. Now I use SL6 on my Aspire ONE netbook as well.

The good thing that I have experienced is the high quality of software packages as compared with other open source edition of Linux which may crash and make your system useless in some occasions. You may not obtain the latest update in time but the stability and reliability offered by typical enterprise class system is certain.
Although "Scientific" is not a cool name to me, it is surely a good choice of enterprise class OS in production environment.

Site reference:
http://www.scientificlinux.org/

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