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WBEL4 Preview Ready For Testing
linuxbeta writes "A preview of WBEL4 (White Box Enterprise Linux) is currently available via BitTorrent. White Box nicely fills the niche between Fedora and RHEL. WBEL Sreenshots. WBEL FAQ. With this latest White Box Enterprise Linux release, is it time to walk away from RHEL?" Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.
CentOS also fills this niche, and I think has a stronger community base behind it. It's been a while since I've done a full comparison though.
CentOS URL
I'm currently using CentOS 4.0, which works great.
What distinguishes Whitebox and Tao from CentOS? As far as I've been able to tell, they're all just blatant imitators of RHEL, but CentOS appears to have the largest community (and therefore, the greatest prospect of actually being around in five years).
So: why bother with Whitebox or Tao?
If it is availible from BitTorrent (legally), then it is free.
It is important to note that Red Hat eningeers have actually helped put White Box out. People here are going to yell and complain about how Red Hat made White Box remove any mention of Red Hat and they are probably also going to suggest that you dont need RHEL anymore. I'm just clarifying that Red Hat isn't out to crush White Box, but corporate customers really were confused. If you want or need support (as most companies and enterprises need) go with RHEL, if you don't need support then go with White Box, its pretty decent and some of the same engineers involved with RHEL have helped with White Box. Personally, Red Hat does a hell of alot for the community in everything from the kernel to the gui so $345 a year isn't bad if your company can afford it and you'll be supporting the community. The only place Red Hat has ever screwed up was due to a marketing mistake, so let's be nice...if that's the worst they ever do then we'll be pretty well off imho.
Regards,
Steve
There are also other flavors available...
CentOS at http://www.centos.org/ and probably TaoLinux at http://www.taolinux.org/ will also follow suit with a new release.
One interesting software release that takes advantage of North-American Linux Enterprise distribution, is Asterisk@home, which comes with a recent CentOS 3.4 build. Spin your own VoIP infrastrucutre from http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/
Its been available and free for years. Its Red Hat Enterprise Linux minus the Red Hat name released under thet GPL. This is a new release.
In fact, this very article announced whitebox finnaly got RHEL4 rebuilt, yet the CentOS team had it finished over a month ago, and I'll be putting my first live instance of it in production on monday.
Had that problem with one of the early CentOS kernels because they had renamed it. Now they keep the name exactly the same so any 3rd party drivers that rely on kernel versions are 100% compatible with CentOS. I can only assume WBEL is doing the same (or will when complaints come flooding in).
as can be seen in the CentOS FAQ : http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faq id=21
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
mirror here: whitebox torrent
in case it goes down (little slow) hopefully tracker doesn't go with it...
Get your torrents...
A former user of Whitebox Linux and a semi infrequent poster to the user's list decided that whiteboxlinux.org didn't provide enough info and started this unrelated website. Subsequently he/they decided that Whitebox linux didn't meet his/their needs and put up that crappy statement. A shame as it confuses new users and spreads bogus information. I wish he/they would just take it down.
To answer your queries:
I don't know the difference between WBEL/CentOS, they are very much alike. CentOS seems to have a larger community behind it, perhaps.
Redhat will EOL FC3 in about 9 months. After that you'll get some sort of community support for a while. The community will have to fix everything by hand. Since a new version of FC happens every 6 months or so and each version will require a new team to look after it I wouldn't assume this would go on for too long
RH will EOL RHEL4 in about 5 years. WBEL/CentOS are just recompiled version of RHEL with the trademarked stuff removed. Support will consist of recompiling the RH official fixes, which is much more likely to happen.
If you are running some kind of server where desktop prettiness is not that important, where stability is paramount but can't afford RHEL because it's in your basement, go for WBEL/CentOS. If you want to keep getting the newest stuff on your desktop and don't mind upgrading fairly frequently (every 6 months to a year) then go for FC.
Beyond even vanilla RHN is the option for Satellite and Proxy servers, which can really be a boon for medium to large enterprise networks.
We're doing a Satellite deployment here, which allows us to do one click provisioning of servers with known package profiles, including our own in house developed packages. It means that instead of relying on people passing command lines around within the organisation to do production upgrades (since each project within our engineering dept packages slightly differently), now it will all go through one interface.
When we build out a DR site in a different data center, we'll probably put an RHN proxy server there to help ease bandwidth usage across a WAN link for updating servers. It'll allow us to continue to manage everything centrally, but only have to push updates across the WAN once.
Redhat support is also not insignificant. When I have wonky issues with boxes, now I have someplace I can call and get support from people who can actually fix bugs and get me updated packages. Moreover I have SLA commitments on those updates.