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The mention of the ISS was not accidental: Scientific Linux has, in fact, been installed there. As a matter of fact, in experimental physics the OS often is mission critical. You need something to run the detectors, after all. While at a low level that usually means firmware or ASICs, at the level of the experimenter that typically means using a computer, with a rather conventional OS installed. Stability there is vital, as a crash could mean (worst case) damage to the equipment, or best case some usually rather expensive downtime for the experiment.

Scientific Linux is a distribution along the lines of CentOS that is sponsored by Fermilab.

From their about page:

Scientific Linux is a Fermilab sponsored project. Our primary user base is within the High Energy and High Intensity Physics community. However, our users come from a wide variety of industries with various use cases all over the globe – and sometimes off of it!

Our Mission: Driven by Fermilab’s scientific mission and focusing on the changing needs of experimental facilities, Scientific Linux should provide a world class environment for scientific computing needs.

See: http://scientificlinux.org/

Congratulations on your daughter's exceptional academic trajectory. This laptop may be worth considering. https://puri.sm/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/pu... This linux distro may be worth her consideration, as well. https://www.scientificlinux.or... cheers, frequency.dynamics

We still have Scientific Linux.

If RH does pull an Oracle (unlikely) there is always scientific linux as an option.

I've worked in hosting, infrastructure, and development for nearly fifteen years. People who care about running Red Hat compatible solutions (frequently for dev or QA environments where RHEL is running in production) deploy CentOS. People who care about RH** certifications deploy CentOS. People who care about deploying mass shared hosting or control panel based solutions crud deploy CentOS. The rest of the world tends to deploy other distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu, or the various BSD flavors.

Given the various train wrecks (political infighting, months without security updates owing the such issues at one point, etc) involving the CentOS project, and given my general love of Debian over the years in terms of stability and security, whenever I have found myself in need of a distribution that pursues RHEL compatibility I simply deploy Scientific Linux. It's a distro maintained by the kind folks at CERN and Fermilab, and gets the job done just fine.

> Are any of these Enterprise distros?
> I don't know of any of those that distribute any of the kernel modules are speaking of.

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/x86_64/addons/zfs/
Now you do.

Have you taken a look at scientific linux?

  https://www.scientificlinux.org/

It's like CentOS, but is supported with a budget by big-name laboratories.

I do not pay for this:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/

I live in the US. Although I have not directly contributed to CERN, the US Government used some of my tax money and donated a half a billion dollars to their project. So yes, I have paid for it as has every other American who pays taxes, at least indirectly. The same goes for many other countries and their citizens.
So unless you're advocating the government levy some kind of "FOSS development tax", I'm not sure why you even mentioned it.

I'm willing to bet that 99% (or more) of the people bitching about the ads have NEVER donated or otherwise contributed to that or any other open source project. The idea of FOSS only works if the users are willing to donate money and otherwise support the efforts of the developers, and for a large part that simply isn't happening.

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

I do not pay for this:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.

So you're saying that you don't pay taxes?

I do not pay for this: https://www.scientificlinux.org/ .

maybe you don't pay for this because you don't live in the US or Europe but my taxes do pay for CERN and by extension for Scientific Linux..

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

I do not pay for this:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.

Gee. Isn't life tough. As I remember from eons ago, Windows is AT LEAST as wrenching. If you're REALLY serious about stability, reliability and freedom from bloat a la systemd, udev, plymouth, la de da, and are willing to invest time up front in return for that continuing stability, allow me to suggest trying out FreeBSD or its desktop friendly derivative, PC-BSD. This would require some real dedication to learn the idiosyncracies. Just to clear one thing up, FreeBSD isn't rocket science to install a DE on. I was doing it a decade ago without much trouble. It doesn't hold your hand and automate everything like PC-BSD does, though.

If you mostly just want a linux desktop that doesn't put you through effing with big changes every year to stay supported, you could do what I did. Install Redhat Enterprise 6 or any of its free derivatives (notably CentOS, Scientific Linux, PUIAS Linux). That way you're good to stay on the same major release, fully supported, hardware-and-feature-back-ported, bug-fixed, and security-updated with good old GNOME 2.32 to at least 2017. I'm a little worried about what RHEL 7's default desktop will look like when it rolls out maybe some time during 2014, but I'm very confident you'll just be able to choose Xfce (as you can now in 6), and anyway there's really no need to make the jump from 6 to 7 until 2017.

Great article. One quick correction from a practitioner in the field: there is plenty of open source software in use in and developed by science. Care for a useful example? The Scientific Linux distribution of Fermilab and CERN is a good example, very accessible to everyone. (And there is that whole World Wide Web thing - not exclusively open source, but still pretty darn useful!)

I was exploring sci-linux' site and they had the "limitation page"

https://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/62/limitations

Well ... it's blank !!
 

Others have commented on just how widespread Linux really is these days, but that overlooks another reason why this is not news: CERN has been active in the Linux community since the '90s! I remember running into CERN scientists over here to talk about their use of Linux at Linuxworld around '98 or so. Back then, they were basically rolling their own in-house distro, but I'm not surprised to hear they're using Scientific Linux now. Five'll getcha ten that they've had a hand in the development of Scientific Linux. Indeed, if you go to https://www.scientificlinux.org/ you'll see, right at the top of the page: "SL is a Linux Release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities..." So, they're using the Linux they helped develop! Boy, there's some shocking news!

Scientific Linux is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

>>>The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source. Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or changes. Examples of items that were added are Alpine, and OpenAFS.

Our secondary goal is to allow easy customization for a site, without disturbing the Scientific Linux base. The various labs are able to add their own modifications to their own site areas.

By the magic of scripts, and the anaconda installer, each site is to be able to create their own distributions with minimal effort. Or, if a user wishes, they can simply install the base SL release.

Pity nobody told the Persians.

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

I don't have any problem with you switching distros for any reason, but wouldn't it be a little more constructive to at least have a LOGICAL and VALID reason? In 12.04, as for any version since a long time ago, you can just install the xubuntu variant, or (not QUITE as clean) just apt-get install the xfce desktop environment. It just isn't so that with the release of 12.04 you will be "forced" to either use gnome3 or switch distros.

PS - I'm not a ubuntu guy myself (I don't particularly like any of the debian camp), and I realize you can readily construct a logical and valid reason to abandon it - but you didn't mention such a reason.

PPS - what I am using is an RHEL6 free repackaging - PUIAS in my case, but CentOS or Scientific Linux is just as good - and I am good with Gnome2 until 2017. Or I could just as well be running Xfce or KDE on it. I really cannot recommend this set of distros enough.

Not to mention Scientific Linux (which was frankly unusable it was so out of date until CERN took over)

I can't comment on the rest of what is written here, but this statement in particular is definitely a false statement. CERN did not take over this project. Scientific Linux remains a collaboration between the two labs. See:

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters. -From http://www.scientificlinux.org/

If you click on the "about" page, you'll see that there are two "main" developers from Fermilab, two from CERN, one from DESY, and one from ETHZ.

From the Scientific Linux main page:

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source.

Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or changes. Examples of items that were added are Alpine, and OpenAFS.

Our secondary goal is to allow easy customization for a site, without disturbing the Scientific Linux base. The various labs are able to add their own modifications to their own site areas. By the magic of scripts, and the anaconda installer, each site is to be able to create their own distributions with minimal effort. Or, if a user wishes, they can simply install the base SL release.

By and large the CentOS team do an excellent job with the distribution - but it's a volunteer effort and there have been some notable times lately when important or security updates which have been shipped by Red Hat run late with CentOS, sometimes by a considerable amount of time.

You could also use Scientific Linux instead of CentOS. SL has the backing of CERN behind it, and as a result it has been much more responsive to that sort of thing. SL 6.0 and 6.1 came out much sooner than the CentOS team could port (hell, I think we're still waiting for CentOS 6.1). SL is pretty much otherwise identical in spirit to CentOS... pretty much a white-box clone of RHEL. Sure there are a few minor improvements. And there's a LiveCD!

CentOS itself was apparently launched by a diskless clustering company, which has since started primarily developing on Debian. So I kinda anticipate SL becoming the premier RHEL clone.

Most places I've worked for would develop on CentOS, then swing for the RHEL license when they deploy to clients (probably so they can bill it and markup a "handling fee").

There is a movement to migrate everything to RHEL for security reasons (mainly so you have someone else to blame if your server gets hacked for any reason, I suppose if you're running CentOS you basically might have to suck up the blame).

I would like to support Redhat financially, but I'm more of a Debian guy, and the RHN is more or less broken on the RHEL6 licensed VM that work bought for me due to some certificate error :-P

I agree Virtualmin GPL or Virtualmin Pro.
Fantastic community support as well as professional support from the Developers.
I started on Webmin years ago. It was so helpful I finally bought Virtualmin Pro 50 server license.

I use the latest Ubuntu 11.04 as my daily system however on a server I use Centos because of it's Long Term Support (LTS).

Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) is a rock solid server as well.

I just prefer Centos and Scientific Linux because they are based on Redhat Enterprise binaries and I grew up on Redhat so it is just easier for me.

INSTALL a Linux DESKTOP install.
Don't do the server install because the Virtualmin install.sh script downloads, installs and configures everything using the Virtualmin repositories.

You can do it with a minimal install that gives you only a shell to start but I like to start with a minimal Desktop install for convenience.

Go to http://www.webmin.com/vinstall.html [webmin.com] and download the install.sh script.
bring up the shell terminal and execute the 2 commands they give on the above page
I just tested it yesterday on the new Centos6 and it did the setup flawlessly.

After it completes the install you'll be able to examine how they setup everything in the server.

You may want to test it on Scientific Linux as it is based on Redhat Enterprise.
http://www.scientificlinux.org/ [scientificlinux.org]

I use ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop but I use Centos5.3 on my servers and am now in the process of upgrading to Scientific Linux6 which in essence is Centos6 or Redhat Enterprise6

There is a debate about Centos kind of dragging their feet and many are switching to Scientific Linux since it is looking to be aggressively maintained.

Read this post.
http://www.virtualmin.com/node/17463#comment-80722 [virtualmin.com]
For some reason the post link in the drupal forums would not link to the one I wanted however if you search the above link thread for Posted: Wed, 2011-05-04 14:51
and read from there, it may cause you to try scientific Linux.

You have to be root for the script to install the system. Centos already has the Root user enabled.

In Ubuntu, you'll need to temporarily enable the root user, then disable it after Virtualmin installs.

I suggest Centos6 for your first test because I know the install.sh script worked OK on it. I'll assume it will work in Scientific Linux since the binaries are the same as Centos or Redhat Enterprise.

I think, Joe at Virtualmin mentioned they are going to switch from Centos to Scientific Linux for their servers.

http://www.virtualmin.com/os-support [virtualmin.com]

Virtualmin GPL Supported Systems
The automated installation script supports the following operating systems:

CentOS 5 and 6 on i386 and x86_64
RHEL 5 and 6 on i386 and x86_64
Scientific Linux 6 on i386 and x86_64
Debian 5.0 and 6.0 on i386 and amd64
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and 10.04 LTS on i386 and amd64

All Virtualmin GPL supported systems are considered "Grade A" and provide an excellent platform for virtual hosting

* * * *

Here is a little background to try and convince you to give Virtualmin a try.

You're in for a wild ride being new to LAMP servers. Running a Linux server is an addictive experience. A blessing and a curse ;-)

In 2002 on Redhat 7.3. I hired a friend, Lee Bertagnolli, to help me get my first server going. He setup the server manually.

I couldn't follow all he did at the time. I was an ultra Linux noob

I agree with Virtualmin GPL or Virtualmin Pro.
Fantastic community support as well as professional support from the Developers.
I started on Webmin years ago. It was so helpful I finally bought Virtualmin Pro 50 server license.

I use the latest Ubuntu 11.04 as my daily system however on a server I use Centos because of it's Long Term Support (LTS).

Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) is a rock solid server as well.

I just prefer Centos and Scientific Linux because they are based on Redhat Enterprise binaries and I grew up on Redhat so it is just easier for me.

INSTALL a Linux DESKTOP install.
Don't do the server install because the Virtualmin install.sh script downloads, installs and configures everything using the Virtualmin repositories.

You can do it with a minimal install that gives you only a shell to start but I like to start with a minimal Desktop install for convenience.

Go to http://www.webmin.com/vinstall.html and download the install.sh script.
bring up the shell terminal and execute the 2 commands they give on the above page
I just tested it yesterday on the new Centos6 and it did the setup flawlessly.

After it completes the install you'll be able to examine how they setup everything in the server.

You may want to test it on Scientific Linux as it is based on Redhat Enterprise.
http://www.scientificlinux.org/

I use ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop but I use Centos5.3 on my servers and am now in the process of upgrading to Scientific Linux6 which in essence is Centos6 or Redhat Enterprise6

There is a debate about Centos kind of dragging their feet and many are switching to Scientific Linux since it is looking to be aggressively maintained.

Read this post.
http://www.virtualmin.com/node/17463#comment-80722
For some reason the post link in the drupal forums would not link to the one I wanted however if you search the above link thread for Posted: Wed, 2011-05-04 14:51
and read from there, it may cause you to try scientific Linux.

You have to be root for the script to install the system. Centos already has the Root user enabled.

In Ubuntu, you'll need to temporarily enable the root user, then disable it after Virtualmin installs.

I suggest Centos6 for your first test because I know the install.sh script worked OK on it. I'll assume it will work in Scientific Linux since the binaries are the same as Centos or Redhat Enterprise.

I think, Joe at Virtualmin mentioned they are going to switch from Centos to Scientific Linux for their servers.

http://www.virtualmin.com/os-support

Virtualmin GPL Supported Systems
The automated installation script supports the following operating systems:

CentOS 5 and 6 on i386 and x86_64
RHEL 5 and 6 on i386 and x86_64
Scientific Linux 6 on i386 and x86_64
Debian 5.0 and 6.0 on i386 and amd64
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and 10.04 LTS on i386 and amd64

All Virtualmin GPL supported systems are considered "Grade A" and provide an excellent platform for virtual hosting

* * * *

Here is a little background to try and convince you to give Virtualmin a try.

You're in for a wild ride being new to LAMP servers. Running a Linux server is an addictive experience. A blessing and a curse ;-)

In 2002 on Redhat 7.3. I hired a friend, Lee Bertagnolli, to help me get my first server going. He setup the server manually.

I couldn't follow all he did at the time. I was an ultra Linux noob at the time.

I made a Ghost backup of the drive in case I messed it up so I could restore and be up and running again.

What really sped up my learning was the discovery of Webmin.

Given that you probably don't need a support contract, CentOS 6 would fit the bill nicely.

Its been a long time since I've posted here on Slashdot - and I agree with the idea of your post - however I would not recommend ANYONE currently doing any new rollout to use CentOS. After just getting a heap of updates pushed through for CentOS 5.x that are mostly security and bugfixes that are mostly a few months old, I would highly recommend using Scientific Linux instead.

You can find more details on Scientific Linux on their site.

In a nutshell, its still RHEL (with a few minor changes), however updates seem to be delivered on time and with minimal delay. The project also doesn't seem to have the infighting that has infested the CentOS world.

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.

Scientific Linux. http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Has the benefit of RHEL: a stable OS environment without some of the headaches of CentOS. If you have money (you probably don't) RHEL is good.

CentOS, while a great community effort, is lagging too much. If you want the lated RedHat unbranded, go to http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Quoting from their page: "SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters." I just use it, and am slowly replacing my CentOS boxes with SL.

Scientific Linux 6 is already out. See http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.0/x86_64/os/sl-release-notes-6.0.html for their detailed release notes. If there was any doubt in your mind that the direct rebuild projects are unaffected by this move, there shouldn't be any longer.

It's pretty clear they're trying very hard this time around to stay in lock-step with upstream (what they call TUV and what CentOS calls PNAELV) and add fewer packages into the mix directly. They're also funded to do this work full-time by the US government, and since many universities and national labs rely on SL, it's not going away any time soon.

If you've never tried it before, I encourage you to do so. To quote the old tagline, it's already ready already.

http://ftp2.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/55/iso/i386/dvd/

Scientific Linux is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative used by CERN and Fermilab.

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!

Not surprising.

I'm not sure why you'd want the CERN-branded SL, as it's configured specifically for their network (their AFS, Kerberos, printers, etc). I used it because I wasn't aware of the more generic version:

Scientific Linux download

I know you are being funny, but CERN uses Scientific Linux. [scientificlinux.org]

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

I know you are being funny, but CERN uses Scientific Linux.

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

Admittedly, this is the same kind of argument as 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment'.

From Fermilinux FAQ

Q. What is Fermi Linux LTS?
A. Fermi Linux LTS (Long Term Support) is in essence RedHat Enterprise, recompiled.

Though now it is based on Scientific Linux distribution.

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Might be worth a look for you at least ;) I've never used it, I just know about it.

You're forgetting:

a) Workstations. Linux has a large number of science/engineering workstation installs - in my field it seems like it has about half of them, and I know that some places like CERN have vast stacks of Linux boxes; they even have their own distro in the works (scientific).

b) The desktop market is huge. Even tenth of a percent of desktops is a massive number of computers.

c) Embedded.

Also, the article is talking about developer mindshare dominance and the summary about desktops. Servers is something you're introducing, though I'm quite sure you're right that OpenSolaris is going to make waves there first if it gets anywhere - just like Linux did. But, of course, corporations aren't exactly known for jumping on new tech - expecting them to switch over half their linux servers to OpenSolaris in 12 months isn't reasonable.

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

http://www.newegg.com/

http://www.tigerdirect.com/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/

From the very site you linked to:

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world.

Scientific Linux is maintained by folks at Fermilab.

All my support for this question. I did switch, long time ago, from Slackware to RedHat (3.3!) because of RPMs, and I stayed with it until RH8, which was too unstable to be used on servers. I did switch some servers to Debian, because I liked APT, but stable was just too old for too many things, so my desktop(s) had RH9 and FC. Were I'm working now I have switched all desktops and the server to ScientificLinux, and I only (reluctantly) run FC5 in VMplayer, to test some builds with an up-to-date gcc4.
  If Fedora wants to be in any way relevant in the business world, more effort should go into Fedora Legacy to support at least selected versions of FC for a longer period; just like RHEL benefits from FC, FL should get back something from RHEL... and then probably the efforts of Centos, WhiteBox and maybe even Scientific might converge on Fedora Legacy.

It seems to me Debian is the only big community driven distro left on the field (Gentoo has a big audience but, somehow, I feel the requisite to recompile everything from source limit its adoption)

I hope the debian benefits from the contribute of those that do not want to support RadHat enterprise (a debian based scientific distro, to superseed the rh7.3 based we have now (SL) would be great).

http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/
http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://frontal1.mandriva.com/community/
https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Perl is one of the last ones I'd foist on someone else who's not a programming professional.

Physicists are programming professionals. They deal with data sets, analysis problems, and hardware configurations that are way beyond the cutting edge. They build their own supercomputing clusters, write their own grid processing systems, build advanced data analysis frameworks, and fork their own Linux distros. At the physics lab where I worked for 15 years, if a physics grad student was incapable of learning a little Perl (and C, C++, Fortran, Java, TeX, and a couple of shells, and maybe some Python and Ruby) they didn't get their degree.

When launching a new physics project, it was a very serious concern which programming languages you chose to do your software development in. If you were conservative and went with a legacy language like Fortran because of all the pre-existing analysis software available, you had trouble attracting grad students to the project, because they wanted more marketable languages on their resumes. The reason is because if they decided to get out of physics one day, their strongest job prospects are in computing and data analysis.

The philosophy and developer base of OSS allows for products to be made to fit niches that big closed source companies like Microsoft can't be bothered to service. The ability to develop to suit the needs of fringe groups is a powerful tool. It's good to see it being fully exploited.

In my own experience, anybody who's serious about setting up Linux servers doesn't bother with commercial support because they are already spending a fortune on their own Unix gurus. Why waste time trying to get your support calls escalated up to a Redhat rent-a-guru, when you have the real thing (hopefully several of them) sequestered in cave-like offices near the server rooms? That's the thing about Linux - it's not hard to find people who know a hell of a lot more about the systems than anyone you could ever locate through a tech support number. What's more, they will happily demolish pesky problems like why your Redhat workstations won't print through your ancient Ultrix printserver, or why your hand-built hundred-node cluster regularly loses nodes 12 and 27, or forking Redhat Enterprise Edition because they don't feel like paying support fees that they'll never use.

The box is earmarked for Scientific Linux (which doesn't seem to get any play time on /.), but, again, ubuntu installed flawlessly and boots much faster than my multimedia/web WinXP intel box, which takes a loooooooong time.

But I've found Scientific Linux (another RHEL rebuild) to be better than Centos, overall. The problem with RHEL-derived distributions is that next to none of the RPM repositories will work with them, because many of the packages are archaic.