Slashdot Mirror
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.
You're an engineer.
You're not the guy who decides that management doesn't want to fork out the cash for RHEL.
-r
This is taken directly from CentOS.org's page.
h p?id=2
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.p
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
3 Slashvertisements in a row, Microsoft working, with Ford no less, to prevent crashes on the road and now we need free alternatives to Linux distros.
This is what April 1st should be like.
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.
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.
What specifically does this special software package require? /etc/redhat_version to make sure they have already reamed you for the cost of linux in addition to reaming you for the cost of the software. /etc/redhat_version, that should work
I would guess, absolutely nothing. It probably just checks
add RHEL or something to
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
So it's a nice question to ask, but I always make sure to ask vendors when they'll support other distros, and the answer, often as not, is "never."
Another one bites the dust
You're spending thousands of dollars on a CAD tool that's critical to your business, yet are balking at a lousy couple of hundred bucks?
Your CAD vendor wants RHEL because they need a consistent, supported baseline to develop their software for.
Personally, I wouldn't want to risk problems later to save a few thousand dollars. If you run into some problem down the road, your software vendor will point the finger at CENTOS or whatever instead of their crappy software.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
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.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
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.
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.
Do your job. If you have authority to decide which of these distros to use, you have the responsibility to make the right decision.
And where are you posting to? Slashdot. What's Slashdot well-known for? Being visited, by and large, by a lot of young geeks with more ambition than they have knowledge. This is the place where people love to trash-talk technology without first bothering to learn what the technology is first (because, after all, all the cool kids know that technology's lame).
Yeah, there's the occasional gem in the comments, but there's a sea of bullshit you have to wade through in order to find it. By the time you're done wading, it would've been easier to just grab all three distros and evaluate them for yourself.
You have a job to do. I suggest you do it, and not substitute a horde of lemmings for your better judgment.
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?
My only complaint is that they can be a little too bleeding edge. They shipped the 2.6.8 kernel with 10.1 and it totally sucked. 10.2 (now Limited Edition 2005) ships with 2.6.11 and has been very stable. I run it on everything from multiproc boxes to my laptop.
http://www.mandriva.com/
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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?
Remember RedHat 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9? I know with 7 8 and 9 there was a different release cycle, free download of ISOs of one of many mirrors, free off-peak access (paying customers got priority when demand was high), and no enterprise level support. That's what you bought RH AS2.1 for.
By using CentOS (to me it looks to be the most aggressively updated), or another clone, you get a configuration which Oracle and other enterprise partners support. The trade-off is a conscious decision that you won't get any enterprise level support if something goes wrong. To many people, and some organisations, this is simply not an issue. To my workplace, it is an issue, so we have licenses. Horses for courses folks.
Besides, you'll probably find there's a lot of insight returned from the users of EL clones - this might not happen nearly as much if the cash-strapped but expertise-rich hackers couldn't get into the product. RedHat must get something out of it in better and more useful feedback, if not money.
I think it's deeper than that.
First of all, RedHat themselves are the ones driving a huge amount of the bleeding-edge 'enterprise' features found in Linux, and generally integrating them first. So, RH is proactively designing/writing enterprise-friendly features, while distros like Debian are "downstream" and will only get them when Linus gets around to patching them into the mainline.
Second, RedHat is actually someone that vendors like Oracle can pick up the phone and call, which certainly helps while everyone's doing QA and loadtesting.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
I second this recommendation. In fact, I thought I had submitted a similar post, but apparently I had a brain fart or something.
Not only is SL maintained by people from several of the USA national labs, but their mailing lists are excellent for support.
They track pretty quickly on RH's heels, and try to be 100% compatible with RHEL. They've complied with RH's terms (replaced copyrighted images and trademarked logos), and don't even mention RH on their site.
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
We expect to have a mix of RHEL and SL. That way we pay RedHat, who after all has done most of the work here, but at the same time we won't go broke as we would if we were a shop running an OS where we had no choice but to pay high per seat licenses.
I have used CentOS 4 and found it to be very stable. I use apt-get for updates and add-on packages.
But if you need a reliable OS, and don't have the time to support it yourself, RedHat's support is a good deal: you get a wide variety of high-quality, tested software, plus you can call them when you can't figure out how to use or fix it, and don't have the time to look it up.
I have been supporting UNIX and Linux for years, so I have elected to take the risk of running my (small) business without that safety net. But as I grow, I plan to switch to RedHat. Why? Because its cheaper than hiring a full-time person to support it.
It isn't a license subscription, it's a support subscription.
Pay up for one system, like you say you plan to, and just install it anywhere else you need it from whatever media they give you. Just understand that you've only paid for support for one system.
Honestly, try reading the GPL before you ask stupid Linux licensing questions like this.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.