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

redhat closeness

[bendsley]

This is taken directly from CentOS.org's page.

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.ph p?id=2