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March 29, 2005

RHEL 4 and CentOS 4

Recently, I had downloaded the 4 iso files that make up Red Hat's newest flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Currently in version 4.0, it is the most complete and robust enterprise Linux distributions to date. The only real downside to it is that you must purchase a subscription to the Red Hat Network to be able to take advantage of the software and receive updates.

This is all fine and good for those of us who have access to a business who can afford things like RHEL and the Red Hat Network, but what about those businesses that want the power of RHEL but either can't afford or don't care to purchase the RHN? The answer, as I've discovered today, is a distribution called CentOS.

I've been under the impression over the past few years that there was basically two versions of Red Hat Linux: Fedora and RHEL. Fedora is the bleeding edge, the latest and the greatest kind of distribution that allows Red Hat to work out the bugs of software before it's put into RHEL. Red Hat Enterprise, on the other hand, is the slow but stable distribution, which is often more favored by corporations for product life and support options.

The other day, I learned of another distribution that I had heard mentioned before, but had never really looked into it at all, but now wish that I had. CentOS is essentially RHEL, but without the support options that typically are required with RHEL. Instead, there is a YUM repository that provides software updates as necessary, and all of it is free.

What's even more interesting is that this distribution *IS* Red Hat Linux, like the way Red Hat Linux used to be. It's the full fledged deal. It's the workstation, the personal desktop, and the server distributions. It's the true stable version that Fedora aims to be. There are even packages in the distribution that still contain the name Red Hat, but the CentOS hackers go a long way to remove any traces of the Red Hat name. By the looks of things, it's an on-going process.

Anyhow, since I haven't done a screenshot in a while, I figured I'd do one for everyone to see what CentOS looks like:

~out...

Posted by ed at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)