On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 04:01:24PM -0600, Wayne Johnson wrote:
> Anyone have any experience with Centos? This is a public version of
> RedHat's AS4, just without the support. Is it more stable than FC?
First, let's be clear and state that it is NOT a public version of Red
Hat's RHEL4 without support. It's based on the RHEL 4 sources but it is
NOT RHEL4. Some things have broken in the past, some things may break
in the future, and if a 3rd party vendor wants to write their installer so
it won't install on CentOS, that's fairly easy to do. I have personally
seen 3rd party installers that wouldn't install on a rebuild in the
past. Yes, people write the ugliest of code when they're looking to see
if they're installing on RHEL4, SuSe, Solaris, or something else.
When Red Hat releases updates, they release the binaries first, and
usually the sources aren't far behind. After that, rebuilders like the
CentOS maintainers will finally get their new binaries out to their
servers and then push it to their mirrors where you can download it. If
timely security updates are an issue for you, then you could be
disappointed.
There have been cases where the sources that Red Hat supplied in the
SRPM wouldn't build properly with the gcc that they supplied. Red Hat
fixed their own binaries by building with a pre-release version of the
compiler, but people who built the package based on the distributed
sources and compilers got a broken binary.
This isn't to say that CentOS is bad or that it's not suitable for you.
I run a rebuild myself (not CentOS) at home. At work, I run exclusively
RHEL3 and RHEL4 on my Linux systems. I see that RHEL4 U3 has hit RHN -
the new binaries havn't hit my rebuild's mirrors yet. That's not a
problem at home but if I needed a quicker fix at work, I could have had
it by now.
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program