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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?"
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.
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.
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
Wrong!! Don't spread mis-information. FC 3 is a beta for RHEL 4. See http://www.fedorafaq.org/ RHEL 3 was already out when FC2 was out. RHEL 3 is really based on RH 9. http://fedora.redhat.com/about/history/ So to wrap up. RHEL 2 based on RH 7.2 7.2.9 or 7.3 (dunno) RHEL 3 based on RH9 RHEL 4 based on FC 3 -A and for the OP: whitebox is okay.
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.
I would agree for production, mission critical systems I almost always run RHEL, but on developement and test systems the cost benefit isn't there, and I run CentOS.
In my experience, any problem I have found on RHEL, has been exactly the same on CentOS, and any patch the RH develops for RHEL, is pretty quickly picked up by the CentOS folks. My only concern is that CentOS doesn't loose momentum, and start to lag behind RH in producing patches and builds.
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.
Yeah, sure (yawn). And red hat is going bankrupt ... for how many years now? So when it is goint to be completely screwed over, hmm? Next year? Two years from now? Five? RH just proves the opposite of what you were implying - it is possible to make money selling a GPLd product, by offering what free competitors will not: professional grade support. Now we can argue whether or not paying a geek to do all the support work for a CentOS farm is would be cheaper or not - probably it will. But PHBs don't care or understand that: they care about reputation, marketing, words like "enterprise grade support" ... something (reputation for instance) RH or Novell has. RH want be screwed over because of CentOS. If it would be screwed oever at all, it will be by the competition offering better services/support options (better marketing) - and that would be another company selling their Enterprise line of products (Novell, Mandrake, you name it).
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.
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?
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)
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?
That's modded funny, but the unfortunate truth is that it's a farily accurate portrayal of the Dilbert-esq corporate environment that so many of us deal with.
Purchasing ANYTHING that requires ongoing license fees is a TOTAL PITA in any company.
Theft of whose intellectual Property? The things in RHEL are not written by RedHat ... they are GPL items written by others and repackaged by redhat.
RedHat has a whole section of their website telling you exactly how to redistibute their software, because it is open source.
That is how open source and the GPL works ... RedHat makes their money on the support contracts, they do not own the software they distribute.
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.