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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 screenshots shots.osdir.com
Hmmm... how about Purple Moose?
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.
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?
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/
Binary driver vendors only distribute binary drivers for certain kernel versions of certain distros, mostly redhat suse and mandrake. The nVidia drivers are an example, but they can also recompile for vanilla kernels, but what about say a binary driver compiled for the stock 2.4 kernel that comes with redhat 9 shrike? Will it work seamlessly with WBEL?
I'd imagine all kernels were recompiled, at least to remove the word 'redhat'. I know I could download RHES kernels from their installation floppies and use those... but is that required to run precompiled kernel modules?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Their mission statement says it all. Centos retains complete compatibility. 'Enough Compabibility' means there will be a divergence between WhiteBox and RHEL while they hope "to support RHEL Erata releases" which is a complete contrediction. It's not good enough to be able to install RHEL erata fixes. It's nessecery to ensure that no other security or reliability problems are introduced by any divergence from the platform on which you depend for your security patches.
While I believe variety in Linux distributions in itself is a positive contribution to the platform's overall growth and appeal, The distributions should be distinct enough to offer a meaningful value-add as compared to others already established in the market (free - as in beer - as the market is).
Where Centos provides an unincumbered version of a supported (and thereby presumed superior) distribution, what is WhiteBox providing over either of these existing and established offerings?
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I think this is pretty interesting. I have to admit my ignorance of the WBEL intiative before tonight, but I am now looking at all the Redhat Enterprise licenses I was about to go buy and am wondering if this isn't a better alternative.
Most of the Enterprise licenses I've purchased have been acquired to avoid the upgrade dance. I know linux well enough to troubleshoot just about anything that comes up outside of obscure kernel and driver issues. In my two years using Redhat Enterprise, I've had to use their tech support once to resolve a hardware issue. I wonder how many other corporate IT depts are in a similiar situation and how this will ultimately affect Redhat revenue?
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.
Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.
That to me sums it up. The *only* reason i can think of to go with Red Hat is if you need the support. Other than that.. what are the benefits?
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.
yet another linux distribution
imagine if everyone collaborated on say 5 distributions, fixed the bugs, polished the GUI's instead of the thousands of distros that are more-or-less the same thing.
MS would of been toast years ago
all the time there are these clones of each other they just dilute the brand and waste valuable manpower, these distros dont add anything significant to the table, its as if Linux innovation has stalled and now people are just resorting to changing wallpaper and icons , sticking a different logo on it and call it YALD
focus is a word that needs to be kept in mind, MS has been so successful because its a known quantity, i cant imagine the nightmares support/service companies will have in the future trying to support all these variations,
thats why Red Hat/Suse are successful
because they have a plan and are sticking to it, companies love consistancy and YALD is the complete opposite
I went to the WBEL website, got re-directed to Whiteboxlinux.net and this is what I saw:q id=19
I've been actively involved in the CentOS community for the past several months. As most of you know I've become disinterested in WBEL. CentOS is nearly the same as WBEL with a few minor exceptions: updates occur in a timely fashion (usually 24 hours), the developers are accessible (even if via IRC), and there is an active community (again in IRC atm).
CentOS has launched a new dedicated site at http://www.centos.org
I have prepared a migration page for moving from wbel to CentOS. http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?fa
I am confused now. Who's who?
Can you spot the subtle misspelling in this statement?
"Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not."
Answer:
There is a iterative fragment missing from this statement. I've bolded it below.
"Not if you want support from Red Hat until the whim strikes them to EOL your product, it's not."
I think it is just the general slashdot mentality. Slashdot group think leads to alot of wierd assumptions. One being that money==bad, but money made linux mainstream and continues to foster more of it's development then any other means. Without distributions making money off of linux, it's development would slow down quite a bit. People don't realize all that companies like Red Hat do for the community, maybe if they grepd a few major projects they'd see. Anyway... I would never suggest that what slashdot's users think is actually how reality works and this applies to many things. One major area being with GUIs. Most notably, alot of slashdotters disagreed with Gnome's switch to the spatial model. The thing is, companies like Red Hat (probably Novell too) do HIG studies with actual users and implement what they find is needed or wanted. Developers don't realize that only about 5% of their needs overlap with regular users in GUIs. Everyone screams and shouts that they want linux to be mainstream and to have all this greatness, but then they scream and shout when money is involved and changes are made that benefit 95% of people rather then their 5% needs. Its just a wierd kind of paradox here, I've learned to live with it over the years.
Regards,
Steve
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnoppix!
You're almost ready to give up XP, but insist that software designed to run only on XP will run on Linux. Get over it -- if software makers wanted to support Linux there are many ways for them to do this -- and some of them do write crossplatform games that run just fine of Linux, but they are the minority. If you want to make the leap to Linux, you'll have to get it through your head that you're giving up many applications and hardware devices that are closed and designed to solely work with Windows.
In certain popular cases people will create workarounds in WINE/Cedega/CrossoverOffice and enthusiasts have created drivers for some of even the most closed off and niche hardware devices -- but you cannot count on them to be easy to install or to work wonderfully. So really, you have to realize that not all software and hardware will work on Linux. What I don't get is that people are perfectly willing to accept that Windows-only hardware/software won't work on the Mac, but they can't accept that it won't work on Linux.
When you buy a playstation2, you do so knowing you won't be able to play Paper Mario or other exclusive Nintendo titles. When you buy a iPod, you do so knowing you can only use iTMS for legal music purchases. And when you use Linux you must realize that certain software and hardware publishers are hostile to Linux and you can't just blindly use anything that expects Windows to be running. If you mistakenly think that one day it'll all be perfect and linux will be 100% software and hardware compatible... I'll just hope you aren't holding your breath until then.
501 Not Implemented
"Why doesn't someone tell this whiny little whore to wipe his own ass?"
And it's attutudes like this that is EXACTLY why Linux will never succeed or appeal to the masses. Basically what your telling me is "Figure it all out and code your own solutions, or STFU".
You wanna know something? I don't program, but I am willing to look into an alternative. Microsoft maybe a monopoly, but at least I can be guaranteed some form of support for XYZ funtion of windows if I'm not able to fix it myself. Thought it might cost me, but I would rather go down that road then having to deal with condescending fuck-tards such as yourself.
I really hope you don't represent the majority of *nix users out there. Because if you do, then fuck open source.
For the record, I'm rather optimistic about the OS community. But you fit the classic example of how NOT to be of any help to a newbe in the world of Linux.
Life is not for the lazy.