
Centos 6 released - fs111
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2011-July/017645.html
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viraptor
What's the point of using CentOS these days? Scientific Linux is basically
compiled from the same sources and doesn't lag months behind RHEL. Did I miss
something?

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ghshephard
The "why" is that CentOS has brand recognition, and many who don't want to
purchase an RHEL license, but want to run software that's been qualified/RPM'd
for that platform, will naturally turn to CentOS.

I've been following Linux Distros for 10 Years, Have built my own LFS, have a
couple slicehost servers, one linode server, and a bare metal server at Server
Beach - This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux" could be
used in place of CentOS.

Now that almost certainly means that I'm ignorant of something that those more
clued than me would consider obvious, but, in terms of knowledge of Linux
Distributions among your typical IT crowd, I'm probably in the 95+ Percentile
- so you can imagine how many others out there haven't heard of Scientific
Linux and just turn to CentOS without knowing better.

~~~
rdtsc
> The "why" is that CentOS has brand recognition

The real brand is RHEL. Otherwise people don't care much what the brand of the
binary compiled Linux they are using. We switched from CentOS to SL to CentOS.

To be honest, the staff @ CERN and Fermilab inspire more confidence in their
commitment to their distro than the CentOS. I understand the guys have full
time jobs and do this on the side, but in the end that becomes kind of
irrelevant for some new end user who is just looking for binary compatibility
with RHEL.

> This is the first time I've heard that "Scientific Linux"

Then you haven't followed the linux distros (especially RHEL binary compatible
clones) close enough. SL is actually older than CentOS.

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ghshephard
Re: Haven't followed the linux distros close enough.

Yes, that is my point. I'm not challenging the fact that SL is a credible,
(possibly much more so) alternative to RHEL than CentOS - I'm just trying to
point out that if _I_ didn't know that SL was a goto distribution for people
who needed a rebuild of RHEL, then I'm fairly certain 95% of the IT population
doesn't either - and that's why _they_ go to CentOS - it's a name they know
and trust (for better or worse)

BTW - in my defense, I just hopped onto my SliceHost/Linode Dashboard, and, of
the 56 version/distros they offer, Scientific Linux is nowhere to be found.

~~~
rdtsc
But now that you know about it do you care really what it is called, if it is
just a binary compatible RHEL distro. If CentOS disappeared tomorrow you could
just run your software on SL, or buy a RHEL license. I certainly do not want
to trivialize the work that CentOS and SL do (and it is a lot of work to
maintain these distros) but when the main point of the distro is to be a
binary clone of another distro, brand names become meaningless. We could
switch from SL to CentOS and then go back. It wouldn't be that hard. If
another clone appeared tomorrow we could switch to that. The only criteria is
reliability of release and promptness.

~~~
ghshephard
The "Brand" CentOS says to me "This distribution is binary identical to RHEL -
you can do all your development on it, and deploy hundreds of servers running
it - and be able to run all of the software qualified for RHEL. You can also
write, and test, software on this platform, and have your _customers_ then run
that software on their instances of RHEL"

I don't have that level of faith in SL's distro, it will probably take a year
or so of observation before I would consider it a potential replacement for
CentOS.

Even convincing engineers, and developers, that they could develop on CentOS
and have some assurance that their code would run fine on RHEL without
extensive regression testing was a challenge.

And even with all this - Oracle won't provide you support if you run their
RHEL qualified Database Server on CentOS.

I guess this is just a long way of saying, I _don't_ know that SL is a binary
compatible RHEL distro, but I do know that about CentOS. That's what the brand
name does for me.

~~~
justincormack
Hardly anyone will provide you with support for commercial products under
Centos. You just have a reasonable confidence.

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jswanson
Too late. Already replicated created Scientific Linux 6 cobbler repos and have
started deploying.

SL seems to be much more on top of things than CentOS these days, and it was
incredibly frustrating waiting for CentOS to release 6.

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sitkack
I really excited to try out the brand new Python 2.5!

~~~
sitkack
The idea of a monolithic base operating system has got to go. A machine as a
unit of encapsulation wastes resources and forces a needless race towards
lowest common denominator bug compatible versions of packages.

If application A needs PHP 5.2 and application B needs PHP 5.3 they should
both be able to exist on a "machine" w/o resorting to complicated maintenance
or having separate OS instances per app.

Witness, <http://nixos.org/> a purely functional package management system.
Use it either in userland or as an entire OS. You decide.

~~~
jodrellblank
Isn't this continuing the debate about centralised libraries vs. localised
ones? Then you have PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 to bug fix, and new applications then
need their own PHP interpreter or they add dependency crosslinks. That doesn't
sound like it's getting rid of "complicated maintenance".

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espeed
Yeah, one issue with CentOS/Redhat was that yum required Python 2.4 so you had
to keep it around and install python 2.7 as python27.

Thankfully Python makes it easy to run applications in a virtual environment
so you can install different versions of libraries into the virtualenv without
worrying about breaking things somewhere else.

~~~
trafficlight
What changes in Python 2.5+ that breaks yum?

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bcl
And don't forget to check out the Extra packages from the EPEL repository -
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL>

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iaskwhy
Can someone explain what's important here for a very basic Linode user?

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nek4life
An updated version of Python amongst other updated packages. Will probably
make installing certain software not so much of a pain in the rear.

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boyter
Having just spent the better part of a day setting up Django on a Centos 5.5
machine I am doing a happy dance at this news. The amount of work to get
things up and running is truly painful. Especially if you are on a x64 system.

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kzk_mover
This release includes transparent large page? This will hugely increase the
performance of memory-consuming applications (c,f. Redis, HBase, MongoDB,
etc.). I confirmed at RHEL6.

~~~
rwmj
It's compiled from the same kernel source so it should have THP (I admit here
that I've not verified this with CentOS 6). And yeah, THP is great.

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nodata
They're still alive!

