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One Tale of Two Scientific Distros (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal takes
a look at Fermi Linux. "Fermilab supports its own users and
directs others toward Scientific Linux, which was codeveloped by Fermilab,
CERN and other laboratories and universities. Troy Dawson is the primary
contact for both Fermi Linux and Scientific Linux. On his own site, he
explains, "Fermilab uses what is called Fermi Linux. It is now based on
Scientific Linux. It is actually a site modification, so technically it is
Scientific Linux Fermi. But we call all of the releases we have made Fermi
Linux.""
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One Tale of Two Scientific Distros (Linux Journal) Posted Sep 2, 2008 18:16 UTC (Tue) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]
I would not call quoting from the FAQ really "taking a look", especially as it's taking a look at different sections that say the same thing about the licensing. There's no meat there about how/why you'd consider Scientific Linux over Red Hat, if indeed it's just a rebuild of identical packages. Why not just install Red Hat and a Scientific Linux package which provides the nice logos?
Well, because it's not just a rebuild. It has less junk and a couple of packages I don't remember being in Red Hat. Despite the name, however, they make it clear that this is NOT a Linux tuned to scientific work, but a Linux tuned to their specific Linux needs.
This is not to diss Scientific Linux, it is a good distro and does neither more nor less than it was intended for. But this sort of information should have been in the article, along with guidelines on when it is appropriate to use.
One Tale of Two Scientific Distros (Linux Journal) Posted Sep 4, 2008 14:42 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Indeed, the tale is actually much more interesting than told here. Of course there is also "Scientific Linux CERN", by the way, so not only is the article very thin, its title is not exactly historically accurate. See this announcement for what must have been an important step in this particular bit of Linux history. I spent a month compiling Cernlib for RedHat 5 back in '98, nowadays it is in the Ubuntu/Fedora/... repositories.
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