Scientific Linux 6.0 released
SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters." A brief look at SL 6.0 is available at the Symmetry magazine breaking news site (which is, in turn, pulled from the Fermilab Today site). From that article: "
For more than 12 years, Fermilab has supplied thousands of individuals in the scientific community with the operating system that forms the foundation for their exploration of the universe's secrets. The Linux operating system produced at Fermilab enabled the laboratory, and other high-energy physics institutions to build large physics data analysis clusters using affordable, commercially available computers."
Posted Mar 4, 2011 0:18 UTC (Fri)
by einstein (guest, #2052)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Mar 4, 2011 0:24 UTC (Fri)
by danielpf (guest, #4723)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 0:29 UTC (Fri)
by einstein (guest, #2052)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 20:53 UTC (Fri)
by markatto (guest, #70420)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 2:01 UTC (Fri)
by leemgs (guest, #24528)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 2:50 UTC (Fri)
by cma (guest, #49905)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 7:48 UTC (Fri)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
[Link] (23 responses)
That said, I've used their rolling release since early pre-RC stages and am particularly thankful for work of both SL developers as well as the "upstream vendor."
With some work at EPEL (and RPM Fusion for multimedia), this can be finally a good alternative to Ubuntu as stable desktop operating system with long-term support.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 9:11 UTC (Fri)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
[Link] (22 responses)
Posted Mar 4, 2011 9:48 UTC (Fri)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
[Link] (21 responses)
Also, I'd say quality plays important role here. (Disclaimer: I participate in Fedora, which happens to be upstream for Red Hat's distro, thus may be biased). Apart from usual (and for some questionable) argument about superior sanity of RPM and readily available packages from Fedora project, Red Hat devotes great amount of resources to polishing the distribution. My experience shows that however talented and capable Debian contributors are, Red Hat enjoys stronger involvement in development of most of key components of their distributions and thus its developers maintain superior technical insights.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 10:07 UTC (Fri)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
[Link] (11 responses)
I might be biased too since Im a Debian developer too, but as the technical manager for 1000 scientific workstations, I can assure you that Red Hat is not a viable option for scientific usage. Its just missing too many components, and it is too hard to derive things from it.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 10:40 UTC (Fri)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
Such assurance from a Debian developer isn't as useful as having customers who deploy RHEL for such purposes as well as the presence of Scientific Linux itself. Perhaps "scientific usage" is a broad category to be assuring anything about.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 11:58 UTC (Fri)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 12:51 UTC (Fri)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 16:28 UTC (Fri)
by southey (guest, #9466)
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Yet many people like myself are successfully using Red Hat, Fedora and related distros on scientific workstations. Personally I prefer missing components because distros usually don't have the latest version (Debian experimental is not an option) or that I want to know what I have installed rather than a huge bunch of unused dependencies just waiting to cause havoc. Also some scientific packages (blas/lapack) have a history of being broken or incomplete so it is hard to automatically trust some distros.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 16:31 UTC (Fri)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
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Posted Mar 4, 2011 17:11 UTC (Fri)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (5 responses)
I am an astrophysicist, and also the computing architect for
Debian has a release cadence that is reasonable for scientific
Furthermore, one can trust, with full integrity, that the underlying
Debian's decision system comes from -- the community. A *real* community, not just one assembled by corporate fiat, or temporarily bribed into existence (a la Shuttleworth). I trust that Debian's integrity, the heft of its package choice, and its direction will remain constant for another dozen years.
The "Scientific Linux" system is an impressive effort from Fermilab, but the decisions as to its architecture base, inevitably, were made by bureaucrats, not scientists. That's simply the way the large national laboratories work, when you seek internal funding to support multiple personnel for a multi-year effort. Of course, scientific guidance would have been sought, and given, but inevitably compromises between scientific interests and bureaucratic interests emerge. It is not at all surprising that RHEL was chosen as a base, given the natural tensions. A scientist
Posted Mar 4, 2011 18:29 UTC (Fri)
by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085)
[Link] (2 responses)
http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0703&L=...
Not too surprisingly, there weren't any replies.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 19:08 UTC (Fri)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (1 responses)
1) Not many scientists outside of subdisciplines of physics use
2) Those who know the inertia of bureaucracies figure they have better
That said, I think that the "Scientific Linux" packagers would be
Posted Mar 7, 2011 17:36 UTC (Mon)
by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085)
[Link]
http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2011/03/msg00006.html
- Kevin
Posted Mar 5, 2011 19:19 UTC (Sat)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
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Posted Mar 10, 2011 5:41 UTC (Thu)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
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Notice how I did not denigrate Debian in any way as I do not feel the need to. I have a lot of respect for its developers and its users... and I certainly appreciate the competition it provides with its good work.
I have participated in many "distro wars" type conversations over the years but I'm beginning to grow weary of them. There are many use cases for Linux and no single distro that meets everyones needs.
Red Hat doesn't have a smaller package count than Debian by accident. As you may or may not recall, they intentionally reduced their package count going from RHL to RHEL in order to make it easier to support in a commercial environment. As you are surely aware, they support their releases for a long time... 7 years at least. If I remember correctly, Debian supports their releases for 1 year after the next release is made available. That is a significant difference that may or may not be important depending on your needs.
Please refrain from telling everyone that if they pick Red Hat over Debian that they are doing so because they are forced to by bureaucratic managers. While that might be the case in some instances, it certainly isn't in all.
Also be advised that your suggestion that Debian has the only true community... is offensive to me... and probably others. Fedora has a community that is sponsored by Red Hat. They do a lot of work. Like Debian's community, Fedora's is often consumed with lively debate and disagreements... an actual sign of a healthy and honest community. Red Hat has a community too... and they include users like myself... the CentOS community... and the Scientific Linux community... among others.
While I appreciate your commentary and the thought you put into your comment(s), I think you should be a little more open minded. Debian is a great distribution and great bunch of packagers, but you yourself benefit by a lot of the development contributions done by Red Hat even if you don't choose to use Red Hat's packaging of them.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 10:44 UTC (Fri)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (8 responses)
Now, there's lots of other reasons you might like Red Hat; if you have a lot invested in the RPM infrastructure, or if all your institutional expertise and code is in their filesystem layout and configuration, the pain of switching might not be worthwhile.
Further, because your infrastructure should then be compatible, you should very easily be able to roll out Ubuntu on desktops, probably with the exact same packages, because Canonical will probably pick them up, too. I think the combination of Debian on servers, where stability is usually paramount, and Ubuntu on desktops (which gets an ongoing blizzard of updates, because they release whether it's ready or not), makes a heck of a lot of sense. Low maintenance burden on the really important stuff, higher burden on non-critical machines that need to be friendly. I just tried out the most recent Fedora, experimenting with using it as a KVM host, and was appalled at how poor the overall usability is in comparison with Ubuntu. It didn't last long on my test machine.
It just seems to me that the distro's entire focus would be much better suited to cooperating with the scientific community; their purpose is not to make money, but rather to make a great operating system, which strikes me as far more closely aligned with your goals than are Red Hat's. I'd argue, in fact, that this difference in focus would probably be more important to you, over the long term, than any theoretical benefits of RPM.
Just a thought.
Posted Mar 4, 2011 12:59 UTC (Fri)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
[Link] (3 responses)
Not true, look at the release notes.
Red Hat splits most of proprietary artwork in separate packages which are easy to replace (you can pick unbranded replacements directly from Fedora if you wish). The changes they've done were rather minor -- look at the release notes.
The rest of your reply is sort of hard to argue with beyond what was already said, we'd be just repeating ourselves. For me (and trust me, I run ubuntu and debian as well, mostly to gain input about status and improvements done to them), I find el6 to be by far the best pick when it came to what I care about (sane configuration, ease of packaging, hardware support, stability and polish).
Posted Mar 4, 2011 13:05 UTC (Fri)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Mar 4, 2011 15:30 UTC (Fri)
by ttrafford (guest, #15383)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 4, 2011 16:18 UTC (Fri)
by ESRI (guest, #52806)
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Posted Mar 6, 2011 9:33 UTC (Sun)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
[Link] (3 responses)
You need the same stability on (professional) desktops than you need on servers. Just because Ubuntu with its 6-month release cycle is popular among geeks, it doesnt make it suitable in a corporate environment. Windows doesnt change every 6 months, that is part of what makes its success in professional desktop usage.
Posted Mar 6, 2011 14:02 UTC (Sun)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (1 responses)
Ubuntu LTS is probably the closest match, but with that set of requirements, I think you'd probably be better off just running Windows in most environments.
Posted Mar 6, 2011 16:43 UTC (Sun)
by Np237 (guest, #69585)
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Windows is a no-go in a scientific computing environment.
Posted Mar 7, 2011 16:57 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
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Yes, but you can get support on Debian and Ubuntu for longer than six months, and you don't have to upgrade when the next release comes out, although I have yet to be convinced that Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu) can be trivially upgraded at the end of a long-term support release cycle to the next LTS version. This sounds like the argument about "old being good", which leaves users with ancient versions of popular desktop environments and having to manually install software from source because the distribution only packages ancient versions of applications. That's a solution which is only good for administrators who just want to push something out there and forget about it (and whether the users actually like it or not). And yes, when I had to use Windows in a workplace, even being able to use a recent version was bad enough. So you can imagine how much fun it was to use an "old but good" version.
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
I am satisfied with packaging quality of SL 6.0 RC1.
I will update entire packages from current rc1 to official release. :)
Thanks again.
Damn it! CentOS Nuken Forever!
Still waiting CentOS 6.0...
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
You are welcome to have your definition of scientific usage but don't force others to have the same definition!Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
a NASA spacecraft instrument team. I migrated a team from
Sun workstations to Redhat 7.3 eleven years ago, and stayed
on the Redhat treadmill to RH9, while slowly learning the many
good things about the Debian system. With the mischief and
misdirection that followed RH9, I professionally migrated to Debian.
I've been there ever since.
teams, and it packages *far* more software than Redhat. Although
both systems make it easy to maintain customized repositories
of super-versioned software, the fact that much of it is already
in Debian means that one doesn't need to reinvent most of the
packaging decisions.
distribution will not jerk you around in pursuit of enhancing their
revenue stream. Redhat has done that several times in the last dozen
years. With a new management team and an overvalued stock, they will
do it again in the next few years (see the recent kernel patch
distribution discussion). You have been warned.
would advise: "RHEL is acceptable as a platform, if possibly not ideal, given the limited packaging of scientific software. Debian is better."
A bureaucrat would rationalize: "I can defend the RHEL choice based on
the substantial and growing revenues of Redhat and its contractual
adoption by major industrial figures. If SL fails and we had chosen
Debian, others may characterize it as putting the prestige of a
national laboratory atop a volunteer, hobbyist effort, and I will lose
face. My interests are served by the commercial effort, which
partially absolves me of risk."
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
"Scientific Linux". I do not know a single astrophysicist who
does. I'm sure there are many users at a few particle physics
labs, probably dictated by management.
fish to fry, and as long as someone else is packaging the software
they need, would prefer to tilt their lances elsewhere.
very well served by rebasing their efforts onto Debian.
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2011/03/msg00007.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2011/03/msg00012.html
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
- A number of motivated people explaining over the benefits to management over the years.
- Money money money; we can do with a team of 10 what a team of 20 would not be able to do with another OS.
- The universal operating system: we can use the *exact* same OS, only with differences in installed packages, for scientific workstations, computing servers, and HPC clusters. Binary compatibility between them saves a lot of money too.
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
If you mean quality as 'stability', Debian is probably the best Linux distro going. They tend to be a little behind the curve, because they release slowly, but their releases are exceedingly solid. You typically need very few patches on the stable distro, even late in the 2-or-so year release cycle. Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
Scientific Linux 6.0 released
You need the same stability on (professional) desktops than you need on servers. Just because Ubuntu with its 6-month release cycle is popular among geeks, it doesnt make it suitable in a corporate environment.
Windows doesnt change every 6 months, that is part of what makes its success in professional desktop usage.