Miles O'Neal wrote:
> I just wanted to say thanks to Troy,
> Connie and anyone else helping maintain
> the SL project.  It's been a real life
> saver, and y'all are doing a great job.

I want to express my appreciation as well. I should have done it a month 
ago, but better late than never.

I had been using aging Red Hat installations for a long time. Upgrading 
to Red Hat Enterprise was much too expensive for me. But I couldn't make 
up my mind which distribution I should use as a replacement.

I tried Fedora for a while. While it certainly is a very interesting 
distribution if you like to experiment with what is new in Linux land, 
it is much too volatile to put on the majority of my machines.

The turning point came for me when by chance I glimpsed a reference on 
Linux Today to an article reviewing Scientific Linux. I tried it out as 
soon as I had the opportunity. I was very pleasantly surprised. For a 
former Red Hat user, what is there not to like?

Apart from the things mentioned previously by others, there are two 
things that I like in particular about Scientific Linux.

The first is the ability to make 'sites'. I wanted to install SL 304 on 
an old Pentium PC, and to my chagrin I discovered the i586 processor 
wasn't supported. By comparing with other distributions I came to the 
conclusion that all that was needed to provide i586 support was adding a 
few missing packages. So I added these packages to my nfs install tree. 
It turned out that some install files need be updated as well. This 
could be done with the help of some nifty scripts I found in the 
SL/build/scripts/ directory. My point is that although installing 
Scientific Linux on an unsupported machine wasn't easy, thanks to the 
flexibility provided by the 'sites' feature it wasn't unduly difficult.

The second thing that I like especially about Scientific Linux is those 
nifty SL_*.rpm packages you can use to perform some very useful tweaks 
to your system. Although these changes can also be made by editing 
configuration files by hand, the rpms are so much more user friendly.
May I make a request for a package that allows the PC speaker to beep 
again on SL 40?

-- 
Paul Rombouts