RHEL clones

So we’ve been looking at some Linux distros at work. Both for the server side, and the desktops. On the server side, I like the stability of the Red Hat Enterprise (or SuSE Enterprise) release model and commitment to security updates for 5 years, but of course we don’t have budget for either. It’s disapointing that Red Hat doesn’t have an academic / research discount for places like us. I heard there was a group that basically built their own distro from the Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 source code. As it turns out, a quick check revealed *at least* four seperate efforts:

A quick look back through the VanLUG archives seem to suggest that, at least locally here in Vancouver, TaoLinux may have biggest community. Scientific Linux is an interesting idea. Right off the bat, though, they get discounted since their web server automatically redirects you to a HTTPS URL with a bogus certificate.. Cheese!

We’ll be doing a lot of research and testing after Christmas in order to “settle down” on a preferred OS at the GSC. I haven’t done a thorough eval of the various Linux distros in a while, so I’m quite looking forward to it.

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Published:
12.13.04 / 11am
Category:
tech