Scientific Linux 6 review

Linux, BSD, and everything else that's fun: Is Scientific Linux 6 Right for You? The Review.

 

Looks decent. Im working on something similar at school, Centos, and while I like it very much Im still not 100% sure Im ready to make the switch to red hat like linux from good ol' debian style. Time will tell though.

 

Considering that CentOS is dying, I'm becoming more and more interesting in SL.

I'm gonna stick with Debian on all my personal machines for the foreseeable future, but SL's length of support does make it attractive for some things...

 

Centos is dying? I think Im going to try out debian in the next few days and possibly scientific linux.

 

I'd say so. They're going to release CentOS 6 "when it's ready", but since the developers seem to be very secretive and reluctant to communicate or solicit the help of the community, "dying" is how I'd describe the project. It gets worse when you consider that they have stopped issuing security updates for CentOS 5.x, since said updates waiting on the release of CentOS 5.6 which is also still in development.

Scientific Linux has a fair bit of paid development behind it (albeit not the same sort of paid dev. as RHEL), plus widespread deployment at CERN and FNAL, so it's got a fair bit of momentum itself.

It's worth noting that while CentOS strives for 100% binary compatibility (basically a branding-free rebuild of RHEL), SL does not have that as one of their primary goals. From what I understand SL *generally* is binary compatible, but since it's not a top priority there are no guarantees. That probably only really matters if you're planning on deploying Oracle or something else, but still...

 

a couple of posts back you said you were on Debian.

 

See this is why I love ubuntu. Sure its the windows of the linux world due to having a large userbase, but support is great and updates are always there.

Centos is pretty decent, but like I have said before Im not sure Im a red hat fan. Different and cool, but I much prefer the debian style over red hat. Since there are cross compatibilities with repositories why try using a red hat repository for updates. Im asuming the kernel calls would be the same or very similar. But if its dead its dead. Unfortunate, but a fact of life. The reason why Im using it is educational labs tend to steer toward red hat style linux due to its popularity in namsake. Most layman may have heard the red hat name somewhere.

I think I said debian based, but if I said debian that was incorrect. Im a Mavrick meerkat user (thats ubuntu 10.10 to all the layman). I did download debian and make a VM on my x200s and I like it, but not sure Ill switch since they are very similar.

 

SL devs have something really good, and I'm not sure they realize yet They've just brought on 2 more developers today per announcement. The Official Site also now links the forum in my sig. So it's off to the races!!

 

Congrats Zoid!!!

Now you will have to curb down your distro hopping and devote time to SL and the forum

 

That's for sure....I've got 3 laptops....my personal laptop is a single boot Scientific Linux x64, with a 60 gig Windows 7 32 bit virtual machine to run some work stuff. Awesome set up, really.

See ya around Dex'

 

Zoid I got SL downloaded... but I'm a lazy distro hopper. I'll get to messing with it in a VM soon. I'm seeding the torrent, that's a first step.

 

I know you've got Debian on everything but your toaster, so I see this as great progress.....

Never hurts to expand our horizons though from time to time

 

ROFL. Yeah, I'm a bit too debian oriented at this point. I started with redhat though, a million years ago. It'll be cool to catch up (fedora turned me off with its first release).

 

Nice! Thats how I have mine setup (sorta), no need to have a full partition for a bootable windows when I VM works perfectly fine for windows compliance.