Niels R. Walet wrote:
> It looks that for the sake of peace in our department we will be 
> converting our machines from centos to scientific linux. On the surface 
> it looks easy, since they should be very comparable, Of course, I wonder 
> about the differences...
> I amalso  really interested in a comparison of scientific linux with 
> other RHEL respins, such as centos, whitebox, XOS, ....
> I note for instance, that centos already has a version of RHEL4 for i386 
> out. I am also interested in speed of updates, compatibility with 3rd 
> party RHEL packages (I use dag's repository quite a lot). Also, has 
> anyone tried the nosrc packages developped by duke for mathematica, 
> matlab, acrobat, etc?
> Any information that may help me to understand potential pitfalls and 
> benefits would be helpful.
> Niels
> 

Hi Niels,
I don't have experience with whitebox, only centos.  I just want you to 
know that, so what I say might not apply to all the other RH recompiled 
releases.

As far as I know we are quite compatible with Centos.  This isn't 
because we strive to be compatible with Centos, but strive to be 
compatible with RHEL, and so do they.
I do know that we are compatible with Dag's repository.  I use it all 
the time, and ftp.scientificlinux.org has a full mirror of it.

Speed of main releases?  I believe CentOS is going to beat us in having 
a release out.  Why?  Because we do change the installer to accomodate 
'Sites', where groups/people can take Scientific Linux and customize it 
to be their own.
We also add a few complicated things, like OpenAFS, which can 
occasionally be ruff.

Speed of updates?  To be honest, I believe we are close, although we do 
not strive to be the fastest.  In the policy we state within 'a couple 
days' of when RedHat releases an errata
https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/faq/errata
but in practice, it's really much easier for us to do the errata as soon 
  as they are released, so it's usually within 24 hours of when RH 
releases a errata.

As for the nosrc packages, I haven't looked into them, but have heard of 
them.

Troy
-- 
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/CSS  CSI Group
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