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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?"
The earlier versions 1 and 2 had a reputation for bugginess.
Basically, Fedora Core 2 was a beta for RHEL 3, which besides being much more tested, stable, supported, also includes the various semi-proprietary doodads that make life nice under Linux.
But I've been pretty happy with Fedora Core 3. YMMV.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Use a loop hole to take their work and use it as your own for free.
Welcome to the world of putting a lot of money into a GPL'd codebase and trying to make a living from selling / supporting it.. Redhat backed a loser here... it will just take tiem to realize it.
Every $$ Redhat spends, every moment of time, all the knowledge they drive into this product will be swiped for free in a nightly download.
There can't possibly be a better poster child for a company that tried to be completely friendly to the open source concept... or one who will be as completely screwed over.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
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
Look, I'm deeply, deeply cynical about the GPL and the LGPL, but even amongst FOSS fanboys, that sorta thing has gotta invoke at least a little twinge of shame.
You know, there are real, live, flesh and blood employees and shareholders of RHAT, who need this thing called "a revenue stream" so that they can put this other stuff called "food and drink" on the table for their loved ones, and this thing called "a roof" over their loved ones' heads, for those rare occasions when they're subject to this water that falls out of the sky, which we call "rain".
But if you can somehow convince yourself [and the US Court System] that this sort of thing is ethical, then I guess RHAT has only themselves to blame for getting in bed with the likes of Richard Milhaus Stallman.
Umm, shoplifting Red Hat Enterprise Linux?