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

I'm a hardware design engineer...

[pg133]

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.

Post should have read....

[Tsunayoshi]

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.