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?"

Comments

Now I've seen it all...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

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.

Re:Err...

[snorklewacker]

Right. He's an engineer. Who has to fill out requisition forms in triplicate with business justifications for purchasing redhat provisioning, have it routed to IT support who will send it to your manager's manager who is on vacation for the next three years or something, where you will wonder what happened, take it back, escalate it, get the budget allocated next quarter, get your credits, IT will get your RHN password instead of yourself, forget to send it to you, make you open a ticket to get it, forget the password, tell you you don't have provisioning credits, have you escalate, find out you do have provisiong credits, get the password reset ...

And they'll forget to renew it next year.

Maybe he just wants to admin the box without having to go through that.