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Free Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0?

Posted by Cliff on from the more-crimson-caps dept.

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?"

10 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. CentOS by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.

    1. Re:CentOS by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 3, Informative

      I did it. No problem at all. I installed yum, pointed it to the right installation source, and my redhat was transformed into CentOS without any problems.

      --

      This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.

  2. Scientific Linux by mewyn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. But Remember to edit /etc/redhat-release by HighOrbit · · Score: 4, Informative
    The latest release of one of our CAD tools requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and will *not* run with RH9.0

    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 /etc from CentOS to the appropriate Redhat version that says "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon)". This will fool some installers (such as Oracle) that demand a supported OS before they will install. After the install is complete, you should be able to copy the old redhat-release (that says CentOS) back without problems.
  4. Re:Fedora Core 3 by agristin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. BS! It will work with any Linux you chose by Master+Bait · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. No, no, no! Scientific Linux is where it's at. by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. I've tried 3 alternatives by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. We use CentOS by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  9. LWN tells all by jensend · · Score: 3, Informative

    LWN reviews RHEL clones