What's the point of using CentOS these days? Scientific Linux is basically compiled from the same sources and doesn't lag months behind RHEL. Did I miss something?
I've been following Linux Distros for 10 Years, Have built my own LFS, have a couple slicehost servers, one linode server, and a bare metal server at Server Beach - This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux" could be used in place of CentOS.
Now that almost certainly means that I'm ignorant of something that those more clued than me would consider obvious, but, in terms of knowledge of Linux Distributions among your typical IT crowd, I'm probably in the 95+ Percentile - so you can imagine how many others out there haven't heard of Scientific Linux and just turn to CentOS without knowing better.
The real brand is RHEL. Otherwise people don't care much what the brand of the binary compiled Linux they are using. We switched from CentOS to SL to CentOS.
To be honest, the staff @ CERN and Fermilab inspire more confidence in their commitment to their distro than the CentOS. I understand the guys have full time jobs and do this on the side, but in the end that becomes kind of irrelevant for some new end user who is just looking for binary compatibility with RHEL.
> This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux"
Then you haven't followed the linux distros (especially RHEL binary compatible clones) close enough. SL is actually older than CentOS.
What I'm saying is that it's really not a a "mainstream" distro.
Yes, that is my point. I'm not challenging the fact that SL is a credible, (possibly much more so) alternative to RHEL than CentOS - I'm just trying to point out that if _I_ didn't know that SL was a goto distribution for people who needed a rebuild of RHEL, then I'm fairly certain 95% of the IT population doesn't either - and that's why _they_ go to CentOS - it's a name they know and trust (for better or worse)
BTW - in my defense, I just hopped onto my SliceHost/Linode Dashboard, and, of the 56 version/distros they offer, Scientific Linux is nowhere to be found.
I don't have that level of faith in SL's distro, it will probably take a year or so of observation before I would consider it a potential replacement for CentOS.
Even convincing engineers, and developers, that they could develop on CentOS and have some assurance that their code would run fine on RHEL without extensive regression testing was a challenge.
And even with all this - Oracle won't provide you support if you run their RHEL qualified Database Server on CentOS.
I guess this is just a long way of saying, I _don't_ know that SL is a binary compatible RHEL distro, but I do know that about CentOS. That's what the brand name does for me.
"Then you haven't followed the linux distros (especially RHEL binary compatible clones) close enough. SL is actually older than CentOS."
I was trying to explain that your average Linux sysadmin is aware of RHEL and Centos, but not "Scientific Linux". That's all. I stand by that statement.
For whatever reason that only the internal developers know, announced milestone after milestone were delayed. The chief complaint about CentOS has been the lack of openness or transparency with the devs. Numerous offers to help and contribute to the project have not been accepted. With little feedback or request for help, users became antsy if the CentOS project was dead in the water. That's where Scientific Linux seemed to have found some new users when they were the first out of the gate with a version 6 based on RHEL.
While it's great that CentOS 6.0 is out, maybe the better question is to ask why not 6.1 which was already released by RHEL some time ago (May 19th) that addresses some security issues.
I used CentOS quite a bit but have moved off to distributions as I'm happy to pay for some software and contribute to other ecosystems where there is an openness to them.
Scientific Linux, while compiled from Redhat sources, does not strive for binary compatibility with Redhat.
So they compile from the same source redhat uses, but change the trademarked media. Is that good enough?
When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server. Aside from security fixes, there's very little reason to upgrade software on a server just because a new version was released.
That would be very strange, RHEL's reknowned for very strict binary compatibility and backporting every security fix to whatever they shipped originally. Lagging behind RHEL updates would normally just mean you're insecure / have bugs for longer.
> When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server.
It is really great when others tell me what I need to run on my server.
Just to be clear, you do know that CentOS is a binary compatible compilation of RHEL? The distro is not about adding feature or improvements or spinning their own from scratch. There is no need to wait for it to become "fairly stable" it just tracks RHEL. If RHEL is unstable, then CentOS is going to be unstable. That is the point of it. Claiming that their lag was on purpose is a little dishonest I think.