Robert E. Blair wrote:
> You might suggest to them that if "branding" is their sole criterion for 
> security they might want to do a little reading on the latest SONY 
> fiasco.  Explain to them:
> 
>   1. SL is built from exactly the same sources as RHEL
>         1. the only exceptions being where trademarks or other legal
>            restrictions make this impossible
>         2. the installation procedure differs mainly due to the above


I think there is not any difference in the installation procedure, apart from the RHN 
registration/activation.



>   2. you should explain that CERN, Fermilab, Argonne, Brookhaven ...
>      large national labs use this OS and they really do care about
>      security. Hell, they not only use it they distribute it!
>   3. Finally if you can't convince them don't reinstall just review the
>      tiny number of rpm's identified with "SL" in the name and replace
>      them with their "EL" version and change to using  the up2date
>      mechanism from yum for keeping things current.
>         1. the beauty of common source roots is that almost nothing
>            changes from one distribution  to another - this has worked
>            fine for me in migrating from WhiteBox to SL and is all of a
>            5 minute process (the only potential gotcha here is how to
>            initialize up2date since this is an area where primitive DRM
>            comes into play and makes life potentially difficult)


As far as I know, Fedora also provides yum, and thus I suppose Red Hat EL4 does too. So I 
think he can also use yum or even yumex. :-)



Myself would also say to whoever asked, that Scientific Linux is a free Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux derivative, that is recompiled from source, and is actively maintained, and used in 
mission critical labs and facilities around the world.

That is, it has enterprise-level stability (rock solid), it is free, has 24x7x365 errata, 
and they thoroughly test their errata a second time themselves before providing them. And 
no server downtimes.


This means one can get some decent GNU/Linux distribution for free.

Before adopting Red Hat EL, SL people were creating and providing their own rock-solid 
distribution in the past.