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Free Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0?
looper_man writes "I'm a hardware design engineer, and our tools have been migrating to Linux over the last years. I've been running Red Hat Linux 9.0 on our compute servers for a while now without a problem. The latest release of one of our CAD tools requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and will *not* run with RH9.0. I'm not very happy with the (yearly!) licensing fees that Red Hat wants for RHEL3.0, so I'm looking for alternatives. I plan on running one real RHEL3.0 server (for any OS/tool issues if I need to verify that the problem is real), and the rest of the machines running a RHEL3.0 clone. I've seen CentOS, TaoLinux, WhiteBox, and a few others. I don't have the time to spare to test these out, so I was looking for recommendations from the Slashdot masses. I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain, and closely tracks RHEL3.0. Any words of wisdom?"
I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain, and closely tracks RHEL3.0. Any words of wisdom?
Isn't RHEL a stripped down version of Fedora, focusing on security, usability, and stability (for servers, obviously)? I'm pretty sure they use Fedora as a "testing ground" for new stuff, to see if it stands up to the requirements needed for a server.
So it should probably run on Fedora.
The earlier versions 1 and 2 had a reputation for bugginess.
Basically, Fedora Core 2 was a beta for RHEL 3, which besides being much more tested, stable, supported, also includes the various semi-proprietary doodads that make life nice under Linux.
But I've been pretty happy with Fedora Core 3. YMMV.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
CentOS is simply a recompiled and rebranded RHEL with swift security updates. If you want something as similar as the real thing, CentOS is certainly the way to go.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Well at first I was going to post a list or two of different distrubutions, and then I read this:
I don't have the time to spare to test these out
So then I was going to recommend a distro or two that's stable, easy to install/maintain
But then I read this:
and closely tracks RHEL3.0
So now I'm going to recommend Fedora.
nil
You're an engineer.
You're not the guy who decides that management doesn't want to fork out the cash for RHEL.
-r
This is taken directly from CentOS.org's page.
h p?id=2
CentOS : Community ENTerprise Operating System
CentOS 2 and 3 are a 100% compatible rebuild of the RHEL 2 and 3 versions, in full compliance with RedHat's redistribution requirements. CentOS is for people who need an enterprise class OS stability without the cost of certification and support.
This should answer your question.
Link I found info. on is below.
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.p
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
3 Slashvertisements in a row, Microsoft working, with Ford no less, to prevent crashes on the road and now we need free alternatives to Linux distros.
This is what April 1st should be like.
To all you reccomending Fedora: Fedora is NOT binary compatable with RHEL. Binaries made for RHEL may not run under Fedora. I'd reccomend Scientific Linux, maintained by Fermi Lab. They keep it as up-to-date as RHEL is, and they include apt and yum for updating. Install mirrors the RHEL install, and is binary-compatable with RHEL.
I've been using CentOS 3.3 and 3.4 on my two CPanel servers this year, and so far, I've been nothing but impressed. Easy installation, easy to maintain, fast updates.
I think a more interesting question is what's RHEL got over another distro that would be a requirement in a CAD tool. Plus, are we talking about a commercial CAD tool or some in-house thing?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
I've not used any, but from what I hear CentOS is a very popular choice.
I'm a hardware design engineer
...I don't have the time to spare
sorry, but isn't that the point, you pay some else, in this case RH, to do all the hardwork of testing and producing a stable OS and providing support, and this allow you to concentrate on what you do best hardware design engineering. I presume you don't want to 'waste time' on trouble shooting any OS that is less than stable.
What specifically does this special software package require? /etc/redhat_version to make sure they have already reamed you for the cost of linux in addition to reaming you for the cost of the software. /etc/redhat_version, that should work
I would guess, absolutely nothing. It probably just checks
add RHEL or something to
CentOS is pretty much an exact copy of RHEL, except for trademark names and artwork, so it should work flawlessly...except for one thing. If the installer is explicitly checking versions, backup and then replace the redhat-release file found in
You're spending thousands of dollars on a CAD tool that's critical to your business, yet are balking at a lousy couple of hundred bucks?
Your CAD vendor wants RHEL because they need a consistent, supported baseline to develop their software for.
Personally, I wouldn't want to risk problems later to save a few thousand dollars. If you run into some problem down the road, your software vendor will point the finger at CENTOS or whatever instead of their crappy software.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
is it possible to change the CAD abit to enable it to run on other linux? or would it even be better to develope the program on a different distro?
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Just be sure to install the correct libraries (ldd your CAD's binary to see which libs), and look at your crappy CAD's startup script to see if it looks at/for RH specific /etc files. This isn't rocket science -- really!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
I've tried WBEL, and I didn't put it into production because we standardized on RHEL.
Our platform needs/requirements...
There were a few packages for which I had to hunt to satisfy certain application requirements (I wanna say one was the Sun JRE, but that may be different now... and I think the application requirements were driven by Scalix 9.0... scalix.com). The reccomendation at the time was to pull them from RH9 or Fedora Core 1 if they didn't live in WBEL packages yet. Usually, that works fine.
I've installed RHEL 2.1 and 3.0 in addition to WBEL 3.0. The install is pretty much the same. The package list wasn't really that different for my needs. And, installing either on older HP LT6000Rs led to no difference in hardware support.
I wasn't a big fan of the stock Yum updater (I'm more apt-for-rpm, but only because I'm more comfortable with it). You may or may not care about the package updating.
I haven't tried the other EL clones, so I can't comment there. I can say that, if I wasn't able to spend the money on RHEL, I do feel confident we could have made WBEL work for us in its place.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
You've gotta spend money to make money. In the case of RHEL the fees are worth any support you might need along the way.
...Anyone mentioned RHEL4 yet?
I know its new and all, but it seems pretty solid to me.
Also, I would consider Fedora as an option. It may not be RH-certified with all the support and everything that comes with RHEL3/4, but I've yet to have a single really bad experience with Core 2/3.
~You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because I'm insane~
I want to have a kick ass stable OS that is supported by all of the software I need but I am too goddamn cheap to actually pay money for this. Can the Slashdot audience please do all of the testing and evaluation for me, let me know which is the best, and them spoon feed me the updates so it stays current?
Holy shit, I can understand bitching about paying Windows Server licensing fees (pay for the OS, each connection to the OS, each mail user on the OS...) but for RHEL you pay a ONE time support fee per year to use their automated updates system.
If you need more than one box and really want to be cheap (and violate your license agreement, but IANAL), buy one copy of RHEL, install it somewhere, update it, pull the RPM's from the cache and setup a LAN update server and install as many copies as you wish. We actually do this where I work except we do it for convenience. We actually have more RHEL licenses than we use.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
Demand that the vendor support Debian. End the Red Hat lunacy.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
As others have noted, Fedora is not the answer for RHEL compatibility, and a tool vendor supporting RHEL will almost certainly not cut you any slack with Fedora, just as they won't cut us any with RH8. Even though the tools run just fine on RH8 for us.
Try Scientific Linux:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
Maintained by one or more of the US National Labs, they track RHEL and build new distros and bugfix packages as quickly as possible. So far we've moved several production compute servers to this with excellent results. We originally picked them for their 64 bit Opteron support; SL3 runs as well there as it does on 32 bit systems.
And yes, our requirement for RHEL3 or equivalent is also driven by CAD tool vendors. The CAD tools we buy licenses for are happy on SL3, and so are our own tools.
CentOS, WBEL, and Fermi LTS Linux. All of them worked well enough for me - the differences were that it seemed Fermi LTS was fairly heavily customized for the lab's needs, so it wasn't that great for new package installation. WBEL was very vanilla, but sometimes support was slow. CentOS seemed to have the best support behind it, so I use it now - recently I upgraded to CentOS 4.
Another option to look at for low cost is SuSE. SuSE Pro is inexpensive, and the odds are that your CAD vendor supports it. Plus you can actually get support from SuSE.
Do your job. If you have authority to decide which of these distros to use, you have the responsibility to make the right decision.
And where are you posting to? Slashdot. What's Slashdot well-known for? Being visited, by and large, by a lot of young geeks with more ambition than they have knowledge. This is the place where people love to trash-talk technology without first bothering to learn what the technology is first (because, after all, all the cool kids know that technology's lame).
Yeah, there's the occasional gem in the comments, but there's a sea of bullshit you have to wade through in order to find it. By the time you're done wading, it would've been easier to just grab all three distros and evaluate them for yourself.
You have a job to do. I suggest you do it, and not substitute a horde of lemmings for your better judgment.
It's worked out fine. Updates are released in a timely manner and such. The mailing lists are active and people appear get their problems solved (though we haven't posted to them). The only issue was that the GPG key used for signing the yum updates isn't automatically installed, but the faq mentions the one-line command needed to install it. Suggested donation is $12 per system per year.
RHEL3 in general is starting to feel a bit stale. For example, the samba packages are behind on many important bug fixes. Is this what you want?
I know that Maya6.5 works on Gentoo without any problems. I'd imagine that 7 would, as well. If that's the case, chances are you could use your CAD program with nearly any distro out there. The only difference I can see is whether or not the distros come with the required binaries included, or if you'd have to hunt around for them a little bit.
...thats like my car only costs me ONE PAYMENT every month, for 60 months.
The difference is that with your car, the payment requirements end after 60 months. However, with Red Hat, the payment requirement is perpetual. Using the car analogy, Red Hat is a lease where you pay on a scheduled basis forever but get a new one(car/Red Hat version) every three years.
I like owning my cars, not leasing them. I feel the same way about my software.
From Distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ferm i
i gin=All&basedon=Red+Hat&desktop=All&architecture=A ll&status=Active
"About Fermi
Fermi Linux LTS (Long Term Support) is a site distribution based on Scientific Linux, which is in essence Red Hat Enterprise Linux, recompiled. It is Scientific Linux with Fermilab's security hardening and customised configurations to allow an administrator to install Fermi Linux and have the machine meet Fermilab's security requirements with little or no extra configuration. Since Fermi Linux LTS is based on Scientific Linux, it shares it's goal that if a program runs and is certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, then it will run on the corresponding Fermi Linux LTS release."
For a list of distros based on RH and not RHEL, but it also lists RHEL derivatives:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=All&or
Just tested Mathematica 5.1 (64 bit) on Fermi X86_64 and it works like a charm - (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 recommended by Wolfram)
CentOS is pretty much an exact copy of RHEL, except for trademark names and artwork, so it should work flawlessly...except for one thing. If the installer is explicitly checking versions, backup and then replace the redhat-release file found in
Look, I'm deeply, deeply cynical about the GPL and the LGPL, but even amongst FOSS fanboys, that sorta thing has gotta invoke at least a little twinge of shame.
You know, there are real, live, flesh and blood employees and shareholders of RHAT, who need this thing called "a revenue stream" so that they can put this other stuff called "food and drink" on the table for their loved ones, and this thing called "a roof" over their loved ones' heads, for those rare occasions when they're subject to this water that falls out of the sky, which we call "rain".
But if you can somehow convince yourself [and the US Court System] that this sort of thing is ethical, then I guess RHAT has only themselves to blame for getting in bed with the likes of Richard Milhaus Stallman.
Umm, shoplifting Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
CentOS
it seems to have the biggest userbase
and it works well
---- Put Sig here:
My only complaint is that they can be a little too bleeding edge. They shipped the 2.6.8 kernel with 10.1 and it totally sucked. 10.2 (now Limited Edition 2005) ships with 2.6.11 and has been very stable. I run it on everything from multiproc boxes to my laptop.
http://www.mandriva.com/
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
CentOS simply rocks. If you like Red Hat, you'll love CentOS because it looks and smells like Red Hat. So far everyone I have talked to has said they can not find anything that won't work on it, and the updates are free. I guess if you can get it for free, why would you pay Red Hat for it? CentOS gets my vote!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
LWN reviews RHEL clones
For my Fortune 500 company, I needed to build an automated update process (using the cross-platform enterprise-ready tools we already owned.)
Of course, politics and contract negotiations made it so that I was not allowed to have my own box for engineering patch deployment, so what's a guy to do?
I found and installed WBEL on some commodity hardware in the lab and began my testing by pushing 'approved' RHEL patches to the lab box. Eventually I crushed the lab box. I thought either I had done something wrong, or there were bugs in WBEL that made it incompatible with RHEL.
What I later learned was that there was an RPM bug in both RHEL and WBEL that corrupted the RPM database.
I tested WBEL with dozens of patches and found it to be binary compatible down to the bugs.
Of course, after we had been live for six months, pushing RHEL patches to fully-licensed RHEL servers on server-class hardware, I was finally allowed licenses for the lab.
This is why people use free alternatives in corporations. The deadlines don't move out just because all the licensing and political ducks are not lined up.
I switched to CentOS because it seemed that WBEL was not as quick to build updates, and there seemed to be a stronger community around it.
Conversion of my home server from WBEL to CentOS was trivial. The same was true for my 'utility-player' linux box at the office.
Of course, it's not officially sanctioned, but when you need a copy of grep that doesn't choke at 2048 character lines, or a quick and dirty ftp server, or a place to rsync production logs so you don't have to give vendors access to production boxes, or you need to set up a lab with a custom mail server and web front end, or......That's why I call it a utility player.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
One detailed example: after much ado, RH capitulated to user demand last year and included the config module in EL3 for QLogic HBAs (in a semi-broken way) so users could FINALLY take advantage of the multi-pathing feature of the cards. Better still, if you have multiple cards, thus multiple physical paths from the system to the fabric switch, and then multiple paths from the fabric switch to your SAN disk, pull any cable anywhere, and things just keep working. Once this is properly set up you can recable your SAN fabric one fibreoptic cable at a time without downtime. Mission critical anyone?
With the release of EL4, RedHat have chosen to drop this driver support for their own software MD support for multipathing. I will admit that their MD system looks pretty nice. There are however just a couple of issues - it's 6 months away at least from being mature enough for our needs, and boot times due to the pathing failovers required during boot blow out from 2ish to 5-10ish minutes, depending on the number of LUNs and the number of virtual paths (hint: multiply them together for the number of failover switches detected by the fabric and the number of seconds it takes to perform this LIP operation cleanly).
Anaconda on the installation side also has a few issues like wiping/initialising partition tables that it believes to be empty already, instead of leaving them alone, and the install does not like USB CDROM drives, such as in the IBM bladecenter (which EL3 had no problems with). I believe the latter is a certification issue, and it's just a matter of waiting for it to happen.
I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain, and closely tracks RHEL3.0. Any words of wisdom?
As a hardware design engineer myself and having moved from Sun/Sparc to x86/Linux about four years ago, be very careful. For example, some of the tools used by Synopsys are native to Linux and some use a Windows emulator (gui tools). The Windows emulator is usually tied closely to the kernel and may appear to operate on a new kernel but fail during heavy duty use. glibc is also important. I've had synthesis compiles fail hours after running but work flawlessly on the recommended platform. LinuxElectrons has news on Linux EDA.
I second this recommendation. In fact, I thought I had submitted a similar post, but apparently I had a brain fart or something.
Not only is SL maintained by people from several of the USA national labs, but their mailing lists are excellent for support.
They track pretty quickly on RH's heels, and try to be 100% compatible with RHEL. They've complied with RH's terms (replaced copyrighted images and trademarked logos), and don't even mention RH on their site.
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
We expect to have a mix of RHEL and SL. That way we pay RedHat, who after all has done most of the work here, but at the same time we won't go broke as we would if we were a shop running an OS where we had no choice but to pay high per seat licenses.
I have used CentOS 4 and found it to be very stable. I use apt-get for updates and add-on packages.
But if you need a reliable OS, and don't have the time to support it yourself, RedHat's support is a good deal: you get a wide variety of high-quality, tested software, plus you can call them when you can't figure out how to use or fix it, and don't have the time to look it up.
I have been supporting UNIX and Linux for years, so I have elected to take the risk of running my (small) business without that safety net. But as I grow, I plan to switch to RedHat. Why? Because its cheaper than hiring a full-time person to support it.
It isn't a license subscription, it's a support subscription.
Pay up for one system, like you say you plan to, and just install it anywhere else you need it from whatever media they give you. Just understand that you've only paid for support for one system.
Honestly, try reading the GPL before you ask stupid Linux licensing questions like this.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Its not 'linux', but it meets your other requirments: "I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sertiously, why is this here? Its not news, its a question