[CentOS] Re: is CentOS stable enough ?

[Les Mikesell]

Andy Goss wrote:
> On Monday 11 June 2007 22:00, arnuld <geek.arnuld at gmail.com> wrote:
>> i am a newbie to CentOS. for my project work i need to have
>> RHEL. so i searched Google for Open alternatives and found  CentOS to
>> be most popular.
>>
>> i have used Fedora, the base of RHEL and CentOS. Fedora is the one of
>> the most buggy *NIX distro i have ever seen. since Fedora is the base
>> of RHEL which is the base of CentOS, i just want to know whether
>> CentOS is stable and reliable enough to work with. 
> 
> From one newbie to another, I suggest you look at the CentOS site, in particular the page 
> 
> http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=3
> 
> As I understand it, RHEL is not based on Fedora. Fedora is something of a testbed for things that often appear in future versions of RHEL, so the resemblance is not surprising. 

Fedora is a fast-track development platform, but is pretty solid by the 
end of each cycle.  Whether they claim RHEL is based on fedora or not, 
you'd have to hunt to notice any differences between the current 
(end-of-life) FC6 and Centos5.

> RHEL is industrial strength Linux and so does not have the latest but still wobbly innovations. What it does have is good and stable, and quite recent enough for most purposes.
> 
> CentOS takes the RHEL source code, which is Open Source, and compiles it as CentOS. They aim to make it totally compatible with RHEL. CentOS is as stable as RHEL, and has what looks like a better update/upgrade process.

The big difference is that RHEL5/Centos5 have a 7 year update support 
life ahead with security/bugfix (only) updates, while fedora rolls out a 
whole new release to develop new features.  Since RHEL/Centos updates do 
not introduce new features, they rarely create new bugs.

> If your project is on RHEL, then CentOS is the tool for you, just make sure you install the matching version.

If you are working on a project to be released in the future, you might 
want to develop on fedora to have a head start on the next version of 
RHEL/Centos.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com