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That's why CentOS exists. It's Red Hat's SRPMs (which they distribute to stay GPL-compliant), without the Red Hat branding, built themselves and give away freely. So if you don't want support but do want something that's basically identical to RHEL, use that. And yes, this can be used on a large scale if needed.

What RHEL really caters to are the CTOs or small business owners who have heard from the trade magazines and their techies that Linux is a great tool, but are too stuck in the Microsoft mindset to think that anything available for $0 and without a formal support contract is good enough to use. So if you're in a MS shop and want to convince management to consider Linux, RHEL is a good stepping stone. And then the next step is "Ok, you've used Linux for a while without a hitch, how about not having to pay for it so we can save the company thousands of dollars in licensing?"

NOTE: "CentOS 6.1 current status : 16 packages still don't built/link like they should. So no installable tree/ISO is currently available for the QA team to test. no ETA for that" ( just over a week ago )

If only M$ didn't make it so difficult to change the RDP port...

Oh wait, it used to be difficult, but now its stupid easy: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306759
Now they even have a program that does it for idiots -- what amazing customer service!
This is why I now respect Microsoft's operating systems - someone finds an exploit and they get vilified, so they have to work extra hard and put a lot of money into meeting a higher standard of criticism to keep a huge base of customers satisfied and using their OS.
They make "QA mistake" releases like Vista, and they turn around and outdo everyone win Win7 and 2008R2..... ....unlike the academic operating systems where often kernels and filesystems and distributions are released with statements given such as "ext4 is now a fully supported file system" http://centos.org/ with severe but not mentioned issues like https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=696545 but they are silently given a pass because technically its a WIP.
With hokey pokey dodgy insecure applications like the authentication-less/unencrypted NFS protocol or the openldap that sends passwords clear text over the wire still by default configuration, or I could go on and on... but I know this criticism (like the criticism mentioned above) will be ignored and treated like flame-bait...

Duh; there is no box. But Fedora is up front about telling you that it is essentially the testing sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise linux. If you don't like bleeding edge, and you don't want to pay for RHEL, just use one of the clones; PUIAS, Scientific Linux, or CentOS. They are absolutely free and absolutely stable, with a long supported life, and are supported with security updates and bug fixes.

Sorry, but there was a stretch of several months this year where there were no security updates released for CentOS 5.x while they worked on 5.6 and 6.0.

https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29685&forum=53

SL does not have the goal of binary compatibility, and some of their packages aren't directly link comparable. They just follow RHEL close enough for their needs. SL and CentOS have different target audiences:

Example

CentOS 6 should start pushing out to the public mirrors early next month.

The QA team should have had the trees for about a week already, and would be receiving the ISO images for QA later this week.

Hope this helps.

You can use BizSpark and avoid any licensing costs until you are a viable business.http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

You can use CentOS and avoid any licensing costs like ever!

They also have a ton of support for startups, including funding if they really like you.

Now that's reassuring.

That's a mailing list archive: not helpful to this question. Go directly to the CentOS 5.5 archive, now set aside to the "vailt.centos.org" site, and viewable sorted by date at
http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/?C=M;O=A. Then compare it to the CentOS 5.6 release packages, and the dozens if not hundreds of published RHEL 5 updates for the time from the day _before_ the release of RHEL 5.6 and the advent of CentOS 5.6. . This kind of 4 month "pause" and the focus on completing a release rather than publishing the ongoing updates makes CentOs unsuitable for any externally exposed servers: it means any remaining 0-day exploits will remain exposed and unpatched and need to be manually built and repaired.

This sort of thing is why production environments cannot merely slap in CentOS for production environments. The much vaunted by core maintainers "binary compatibility" with RHEL is pointless when the "compatible components" for the current release of RHEL have not been published.

It's seems they are in the final stages. Apparently external mirrors will be synced June 6.
http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa

Please show me the gap in the security updates where they did this "held up all updates". Helpful link below


http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/
,br/>
I get their update emails, haven't noticed any hole in the stream in the last year....

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa
ISOs of 6.0 should be available in a week. I doubt that 6.1 will be too far behind.

You missed the next month:
http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/calendar/view/2011-6

"6.0 begin sync to external mirrors" is June 6.

Maybe a release within a week of that.

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa
ISOs of 6.0 should be available in a week. I doubt that 6.1 will be too far behind.

You missed the next month:
http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/calendar/view/2011-6

"6.0 begin sync to external mirrors" is June 6.

Maybe a release within a week of that.

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa
ISOs of 6.0 should be available in a week. I doubt that 6.1 will be too far behind.

Cool beans.

Where's CentOS 6? I don't understand what's taking them so long. Don't they just remove the RedHat branding and re-package?

According to this thread on the CentOS bulletin board they are about to begin the QA, which means that it will probably be released soon.

User are leaving Centos left and right, security patches are months behind schedule, Centos 6 is over 6 months behind RH enterprise 6, the devs are a closed group and will not accept help, and do there best to allienate the user base

While I agree with you, they are working on the openness. The now have a QA dashboard website that lets you follow the progress of CentOS 6:

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/dashboard

There are no less than 3 versions of the 2 GB WD Green: 3, 4 & 5 platter. The latest version (3 platter) is pretty quick. I'm guessing they were testing against the 5 platter.

The best way to deal with alignment is to manually partition (if you use Linux) and use 4K filesystem block size as well. But I think the newest Linux distros will work with 4K drives now (I know Fedora 14 and RHEL 6 do).

What about the CentOS plus kernels? Wouldn't It make it trickier to create those as it's necessary to avoid munging stuff that's already there but the devs don't know what or where it is?

Usually takes 6 weeks or so. You can follow the CentOS twitter feed here to keep up.

In addition, sounds like there may be new ways shortly for tracking CentOS development.

Mailing list story is that "I believe that a beta will be available some time after the RHEL 6 production release.", http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2010-November/006005.html

CentOS 5 fixes are available - see http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=4518 Redhat 5 also has new kernel - see https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0704.html GO GO GO !!!

Actually, there *is* an alternative repository that is 100% binary compatible with the enterprise editions of the distro you refer to. You may have heard of it...
http://www.centos.org

The distro you refer to also has their own totally free Linux distro/repository, which you also may have heard of...
http://fedoraproject.org/

The business model of your example is not simply repository access. What you're paying for with their "main distribution" is easier access to support and updates/patches.

This is why your OS doesn't include it and makes you download it from Sun/Oracle.

Your OS might not. Mine does.

You mean like Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS, which is built from the exact same source?

Running Oracle on Linux isn't different from running Oracle on Solaris.

Of all the major linux distro's only OpenSuSE still ships with Xen, redhat, centos, fedora, debian and ubuntu are all kvm only and have been for quite some time.

I don't know about the other distro's you mention, but CentOS only just added KVM packages in version 5.4, which was released a mere 7 months ago. The last version I used was 5.3 which had Xen as the default. From reading the current docs, it seems like it still is.

Xen gets hyped because most major cloud computing stacks run on top of it. Try explaining to upper management why you want to use something different than what Amazon used even though it's free. That being said, I'm not trying to criticize Xen...I think they're both great.

If we were able to "reboot" the internet, xml wouldn't exist.

In that sense, it seems a bit like C. If we were to "reboot" the software world, C wouldn't exist, and we'd (hopefully) have something better in its place.

But if you're going to replace it, have something better to replace it with.

Let's dissect this:

I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing...

I'm big and important. Sounds familiar, actually. Here's what Jerry Taylor had to say about himself:

I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.

Years of experience doesn't automatically make you an expert, as Mr. Taylor's record shows.

A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text. That is, the markup is a departure from the state that existed at the time the markup was encountered.

What about XML prevents it from being used in exactly that way?

Another tenet of a markup language is that only the syntax is specified. The semantics of what the markup means is implicit (HTML) or described earlier (Scribe) or some combination of the two (CSS).

Given this, what is problematic about a generic markup language?

a pure ASCII text file is a valid example of any markup language.

Bullshit, and HTML is the perfect example. Even if you ignore all the stuff the standards ask you to add -- even HTML4 wants a DOCTYPE at the top -- anywhere I want to use the < character, I have to escape it. This is true of any markup. (Plain text really doesn't count as a "markup language" in its own right, as it provides no means of, oh, marking things up.)

So this "expert" is factually wrong -- or at best, exaggerating on one of his main points. The blog itself is hardly unbiased. On to the next:

XML is most often used as a kind of container to hold structured data of some kind.

In this case, I would agree that there are much better choices. Depending on the data, I might use JSON, Yaml, or separate out the binary bits into a separate file, or a custom format if I actually need vertical performance.

There is one big problem with XML as a container. Its syntax, which is borrowed from HTML and SGML, involves angle brackets and a begin/end paradigm. The problem with this is that you can't embed similar data inside the XML file without escaping all the angle brackets.

That's true of using any markup language to hold structured data, including embedding source code in a string in source code. So what?

It also makes it essentially impossible to embed binary data in an XML file because you can't know whether or not to escape the XML sequences within the binary data (you should NOT, if the binary data is to be respected).

What? No, you should, so that the binary data will be extracted as a raw string. That said, I don't think XML was ever designed to handle binary data -- the only ways it currently does is as a Base64-encoded string.

This is why, for instance, both OOXML and OpenDocument are apparently stored as a zipfile containing several XML documents and several binary files, where the binary files represent images. This makes sense, and it's more or less the same structure as HTML.

There are many other approaches to file formats which might have been better choices. For example, instead of a begin/end paradigm, specifying type and length data allows unambiguous parsing.

It also sacrifices the ability of humans to edit and debug the data with a text editor, as the article says:

It is not, however, easy to comp

Erm, why not try a more legit-smelling tracker? ;)

The CentOS project is serving the beta ISOs from their tracker, but Ill be damned if I can find the .torrent files served via CentOS. $random_blog_guy is serving some which link you up to the CentOS tracker.

It appears that you are referring to Karanbir Singh as "random blog guy". If this is indeed the case, have a look at The CentOS Development Team located at http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=2.

Sorry if I mis-interpreted your statement.

Try CentOSPlus for starters. It throws in Kernels with drivers that aren't included by default by RedHat for example.

I'm not sure if they'll do XEN support for CentOS6 or anything, but its a thought.

Erm, why not try a more legit-smelling tracker? ;)

The CentOS project is serving the beta ISOs from their tracker, but Ill be damned if I can find the .torrent files served via CentOS. $random_blog_guy is serving some which link you up to the CentOS tracker.

http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-i386-beta-dvd.torrent
http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-ppc64-beta-dvd.torrent
http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-x86_64-beta-dvd.torrent
http://torrent.centos.org:6969/

Sums check out. Waaaay faster than the smoldering ftp.redhat heap that were all machine-gunning. ;)

this is just useless in the real world

Define "real world". And I've been there, held down a job, and been perceived as friendly and helpful by non-techies, so I do understand how it works.

But again, you come to my pet project, demand support for something you got for free -- in other words, demand that I take more of my time to help you -- and you don't bother to do your homework? If you want to talk about "what works", what works is for me to ignore you, because I don't owe you anything, and any time I spend dealing with you would be better spent improving the project.

In light of that, some amount of generosity and genuine desire to help will prompt some sort of response -- but that there was even a response is useless.

I'm not arguing that I should actually do that, but your argument fails both from a utilitarian point of view ("useless in the real world") and a common decency point of view (do your homework, so I don't have to).

you still remain with the RUDE stamp for ever after;

I can deal with that.

Let me put it this way: It's considered mildly irritating, but generally socially acceptable, for people to approach me out of nowhere -- on the street, in my house, wherever -- and ask if I've been saved. No one really seems to have a problem with people telling me that I'm going to hell because I don't believe whatever they believe. Hell, "In God We Trust" is on all our currency -- added relatively recently, but it's there -- and no one seems to mind. "Under God" was snuck into the Pledge of Allegiance to set us Christians apart from the Atheist Communists, never mind being unconstitutional and uncomfortable for a large portion of the population.

Yet as soon as I say anything about being an atheist, or about finding their beliefs to be foolish, I'm seen as rude. When Michael Newdow tries to get "Under God" removed from the Pledge, he's the rabble-rouser, the one who couldn't leave well enough alone, the "rude" one.

In short, people are quick to take offense at anyone, for any reason, especially someone who is different than them in some way. Rudeness is based on weird societal norms, the sort which, on close examination, most of us would not agree with.

If you want a clear example of this, look at Richard Dawkins. Religious people tend to see him as arrogant, obnoxious, and offensive. Nonreligious people tend to see him as intelligent, polite, well-spoken, and a genuinely nice guy. James Randi is about as polarizing -- either you love him as almost a grandfatherly figure, or you hate him because he called something you believe in and are passionate about "Woo-Woo", but probably for good reason.

What would your suggestion be, here? Should Dawkins have to become an absolute sycophant in order to be seen as "normal"? Would that even work for him? After all, many people are still going to view him as rude simply for existing.

Or, bring it back to me -- no matter how polite I am, and it would take a significant amount of work, there are some people who will be offended, even by a legitimate attempt to help -- and note that there are many people, including Taylor himself, who still think that situation was handled poorly. The first email, maybe, but look at the second one.

accept that you will pay the consequences :-).

If the consequence is that someone thinks I'm rude, that's OK. But this standard needs to change. It needs to not be rude to call people on things like this -- people need to be a lot more self-sufficient, and a lot more humble, when entering a new field. Otherwise, you end up with stuff like this.

Like others mention, use a virtual machine like VirtualBox, and give everyone a virtual machine of your Linux system in addition to instructions to set up their own. This will save countless hours of helping your students get up and running.

To your question, what distro? I'd recommend Centos, which is a free as in beer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and/or Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). The only real differences between the three is branding and the support contract, with a five year support plan. Both Red Hat and Oracle have a Linux certification test, if you are looking to have a 'real' certificate when they are done.

"Same for Red Hat. Sure, here's the source code. Now compile it yourself, with no support."

http://www.centos.org/

"Red Hat has milked the support model about as far as it can go."

Which explains, of course, their continuous growth over the past 7 years, their profitable spread into the middleware market with JBoss, and their acquisition of dozens of smaller open source companies. Yes, the model is really starting to show cracks.

"This is why, if they wished, IBM or Apple could buy Red Hat with spare pocket change if they wanted to."

Red Hat is growing as a business. Sure, IBM or Apple could probably pull together the $5 billion it would take to buy out Red Hat, but that does not mean that Red Hat is a failing business or that their business model is flawed. It just means that they are not as big or old -- Apple had years of business before Red Hat was even conceived of, and IBM has had decades to grow into the giant it is today.

"Software, as we presently know it, is still a product."

Except that, unlike most products, software is trivial to copy, even for someone with no experience with computers. Software does not age; if software from 20 years ago is bad today, it is because it was just as bad back then. It is not a product the way a car is a product, or the way a bushel of apples is a product.

That is the reason that the open source development model is so successful for software -- because software is not like other "products." I can take some software and make a lot of copies of it, without spending a significant amount of money, time, or effort. When you find a way to do that with your car, we might see successful open source development of automobiles.

Red Hat takes advantage of the open source development model and has turned it into a very profitable business. Red Hat only hires a fraction of the number of developers that its competitors hire, but they have a lot of other people collaborating with them on their software. That is where the success comes from: Red Hat does not have to hire a developer to work on every single feature in RHEL or JBoss, because other companies and interested individuals collaborate with them. There is no need for Red Hat to pay every single Linux kernel developer, at least not with dollars and cents; there is just an understanding that Red Hat will put some effort in, just like everyone else, and everyone can use any other developer's work however they choose.

If Sun had GPL'ed Solaris, and followed the model they follow with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, or the RHEL/Fedora model, they could have committed more resources to their more profitable ventures, without having to lose a solid and well established "product" in the mean time. Solaris was not really a big money maker toward the end, because like most proprietary Unixes, it was being killed by GNU/Linux (at least in the server rooms, where it mattered). They could have continued to sell support as part of their hardware support business, but without the added overhead of having to commit so many skilled developers to Solaris.

You should not discount the competitive advantage that GPLed code can bring, particularly when there is a large community of interested companies and individuals that are willing to cooperate on the software. OpenOffice.org would not be worth anyone's time if there was not a community working on it; same with Apache, GNU, Linux, or any of the other successful open source projects out there. The GPL does not just mean giving away code; it means getting code in return, often more than was given. That is how Red Hat works, and that is why they are able to focus their resources on support.

Funny, I was always under the impression that Linux can be had cheap but not Red Hat. From what I hear the service is great and all that, but it's hardly the MacDonalds of the server world.

You should probably have a look at CentOS, who recompile the Red Hat sources to make a similar (but not commercially supported) distribution. CentOS is free as in no cost.

Both RHEL and CentOS are free/open source software. If you decide not to renew your RHEL license after the first year, you don't have to uninstall the software or have the heavies from the BSA coming round -- instead you have the sources and may decide to continue supporting it yourself or buy in support from another company.

Rich.

This is yet another example of too many to name, of Red Hat being an all-around bunch of warm and fuzzy penguins, guys! And this is so typical of them: buy a proprietary product, and as soon as they decide to do something with it, they open source it first!

RedHat has NEVER deviated from their policy of releasing SRPMS for all their stuff. You can very literally roll your own distro simply by taking their SRPM and compiling them! And a number of groups have done just that: White Box Linux, CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Red Hat employs some of the most prolific contributors to the Linux Kernel and is a vital force in making Linux what it is today. Go Red Hat!

PS: No, I don't work for them, just a very happy customer!

What about that mess with Centos and refusing to let them acknowledge that they're based off of Red Hat's distro?

Never happened.

In fact, look at the bottom of http://www.centos.org/

CentOS is a distribution that deals in long-term stability and security. Branched off as a free version of the vastly popular RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS is everything the most important server distribution is, except the expensive, official support from the vendor. Speaking of support, CentOS 5.x versions, which are all based on RHEL5.x versions, are going to be supported until 2014, a total of seven years since the major release launch in 2007.

Looks like they are acknowledging they are based off RedHat just fine.

Now, what HAS happened, was CentOS attempted to put the RedHat logo on their product, which is not legal to do with trademarks (At least marks that are not your own.)
Additionally, unless RedHat wanted to the world to use their name/logos in any way imaginable and have zero legal defense against any and all abuse, then they are require by law to do what was done.

If it was legal to have you sign a contract to give up the right to sue anyone for libel and slander, I would ask you do simply so when people do a smear campaign, and do a ton of bad evil things in your name that you now have no legal recourse for, just so you would be in their position and know the results of the course you are demanding from RedHat.
(Oh, then post on slashdot how you are an asshole for complaining about the people ruining your name and reputation, of course ;)

Doesn't sound pleasant, eh?

You can only hold a person responsible (or give credit for accomplishments) when it was done by their free will, not when they are forced into it, by law or any other way

I've worked with Ruby for over a year and a half, and I can say with absolute confidence that the language is horrible. You can flame back to this all you want...

That might be an interesting discussion, actually, but:

...the fact remains that it's a slow blob and throwing more hardware at it is a stupid argument.

See, that's a property of the implementation, not the language. You have noticed what's happened to Javascript lately, right? It used to be slower than Ruby. With v8, it's faster than Python.

Also, you fail to address why throwing hardware at it is a stupid argument, and you don't provide any benchmarks that it's slow.

No major VM is going to make it rival the top languages in raw processing power (C/C++/Java even Python).

If you actually looked at benchmarks, you'd notice that if nothing else, Rails beats PHP, consistently, for performance.

And Rails "automagic" combined with Ruby's inability to report exceptions in a meaninful way (the backtrace is 99% rubbish, and often reports the error in a place where it didn't even occur)

It would help if you actually gave an example here, but you don't. In my experience, the backtrace is actually quite helpful, but use of unit tests and specs helps avoid it.

As for Ruby in a browser - there's already projects that do that, and do it fairly well.

Which is one of the things TFA is about. So what's your point?

Some of them use Applets, which is where suddenly everyone has a hissie fit. Yeah, using a proprietary Windows-centric tech like Silverlight is a MUUUUCH better option.

I suspect Silverlight is at least faster to load, but I haven't tried doing either. Javascript does what I want it to do well enough.

Or writing a VM in JavaScript? Talk about MOLASSES!

Again, benchmarks or it didn't happen. Make sure to test it in one of the better Javascript engines, like v8.

If I want to use a quick scripting language with ample flexibility and power, I'll use Groovy, thank you very much. For one thing, Groovy and Grails gives me a LOT more choice as flexibility over RoR any day of the week.

Can you give an example of how? I mean, for one, there only really seems to be Grails, whereas Ruby has more web frameworks than VMs, and that's saying something. Take Sinatra, for example:

get '/' do
  'Hello, world!'
end

That's right, a REST DSL. What has Groovy got, again?

So, Rubyists, have your little childish flames now.

That's the most literal example of flamebait I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone's really flaming you back. I'm the closest, and I'm just asking for facts.

And don't assume I'm a "n00b" - I've got over 15 years IT experience in more languages that I can list in this comment block.

With all that experience, you couldn't figure out that the comment block seems to allow very, very long comments -- almost certainly longer than the total list of programming languages that exist?

More importantly, you seem to have fallen into the same trap that Jerry Taylor did. I have no idea what your experience is, but it certainly doesn't seem to be reflected here.

You should try Fedora, imo it's a lot better than Ubuntu/Debian. And it's backed by Red Hat, which is a lot larger and older than Canonical.

Horses for courses. I love Fedora, but you don't get long term support. Don't forget CentOS which is also an RPM based free distro.

Actually, CentOS/Fedora and RHEL together make quite a nice solution since they have many similarities and you can just switch between them according to the particular needs of a particular application.

http://www.centos.org/

I understand that Red Hat was within their rights to protect their trademark, but they could have been much more pleasant about it.

Or get it from Red Hat, but don't pay them.

True.

So no updates for the recently-released CentOS 5.3 for a while either (according to this thread).

For Centos it is already in the CentOS Plus kernel. ( http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus )

As others have mentioned it is available in RHEL as a preview which I believe means that it's available but they don't provide official support for it.

Assuming no devs disappear or go on honeymoon ;-)

Or "crawl into a hole."

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=381

Well actually 2-4 weeks it seems:

https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=22004&forum=37

Assuming no devs disappear or go on honeymoon ;-)

This FAQ http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=5 is very incompletion. I want to add next sentence on this webpage. "But this project is roled by a few people who are unbalance. So it's dangerous to use this distribution on your enterprise class computing platform."

1. Learn English.
2. Learn to troll properly.
3. Suck my dick.

This FAQ http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=5 is very incompletion. I want to add next sentence on this webpage. "But this project is roled by a few people who are unbalance. So it's dangerous to use this distribution on your enterprise class computing platform."

Link? Mine mentions "two weeks" but not "2008".

of their website:

CentOS has numerous advantages over some of the other clone projects including....developers who are contactable and responsive

So which of the developers you have contacted hasn't replied to you?

CentOS has numerous advantages over some of the other clone projects including....developers who are contactable and responsive