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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why science labs would need a cusotmized distro. Can anyone clue me in? What payoff do they get from one that offsets the cost of creating and mantaining it?

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Lots of kernel customizations.

When I worked at CERN, the Atlas project was developing high performance network stacks with low level IP protocols, to be able to cope with the data throughput from the particle accelerator.

Interesting.

Maybe that's part of the answer, but you can run a custom kernel in probably any distro - no need to provide an entire distro from scratch for that. So there must be more to it.

Well, they're not really creating a distro from scratch in the way that Debian maintainers pull source code from various upstream projects and spend weeks to months doing bug testing. The RHEL sources that the SL folks pull have already been bug tested and verified to work very well. The SL folks are compiling those sources (with their own modifications). Of course, you could do this with the Debian or Ubuntu source code, but I guess they figure if you're going to get source code from somewhere, it might as well be a well-known enterprise distro.

Why not just contribute the changes they need upstream where possible, and maintain a repo for additional "scientific" packages (or just fork and start new projects) when that strategy doesn't work?

Because then they would no longer have complete control over what gets in their packages. In a place like CERN, total control is something people like to have.

Thanks, but and maintain a repo for additional "scientific" packages (or just fork and start new projects) when that strategy doesn't work

Probably for the sake of cooperation, so it's easier for people at the various labs to develop, package, and support scientific applications that are used across the community.

RHEL is expensive.

They have a "self support" license, which is basically just a subscription to a yum repo. In the net cost of my hardware and datacenter bills, its a pretty tiny part. I'm glad to pay it to fund the development of something that saves me so much time and provides so much value.

That's not much of an answer, given that there are dozens of free distros already, any of which would appear suitable.

There's not dozens of RHEL clones. There is CentOS, but it's had its problems lately and Scientific Linux predates it.

If you're suggesting that other random free distros are suitable when one is looking at RHEL or an RHEL clone... well, that's rather silly.

If you're suggesting that other random free distros are suitable when one is looking at RHEL or an RHEL clone... well, that's rather silly.

Call it silly if you want, but yes, I would like to know the answer to that. I'm being perfectly serious. I've used several Linux distros (though maybe I'm not an expert), and at the end of the day, they all run the same programs.

RHEL is extremely stable and releases are supported for much longer than other Linux distros. Also, some commercial software is designed to work on specific versions of RHEL.

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