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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?"
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 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
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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.
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
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
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.
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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.
Right. He's an engineer. Who has to fill out requisition forms in triplicate with business justifications for purchasing redhat provisioning, have it routed to IT support who will send it to your manager's manager who is on vacation for the next three years or something, where you will wonder what happened, take it back, escalate it, get the budget allocated next quarter, get your credits, IT will get your RHN password instead of yourself, forget to send it to you, make you open a ticket to get it, forget the password, tell you you don't have provisioning credits, have you escalate, find out you do have provisiong credits, get the password reset ...
And they'll forget to renew it next year.
Maybe he just wants to admin the box without having to go through that.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot