On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Alan McKay alan.mckay@gmail.com wrote:
I was just reminded of the Scientific distro, which on the surface appears to be quite similar to CentOS even when the developers over there are rather coy about which Enterprise Linux distro they base theirs on.
I wonder if anyone here has done a comparison of the two that they'd care to share.
I work in a Scientific Research Lab (Stem Cell Research) and am wondering if there is anything about the Scientific disto that might be better suited to our needs, even if it is only the fact that it is put together by people who work in similar environments and would therefore understand our needs better.
I'm just starting to read up on it to see what I think and thought I would ask what others think.
One thing I will have to look into of course is what kind of support there is - this list is absolutely fantastic for CentOS and that alone is worth a lot.
CentOS attempts to be strictly/religiously compatible with upstream except for merging the workstation/server variations - to the point that it is supposed to be easy to buy a support contract and flip to RHEL for updates. SL makes some changes on purpose: http://www.scientificlinux.org/about/customize and makes strict compatibility less of a priority. But it is still a rebuild from the same sources and I would doubt that you'd see any practical difference in running any particular application under them.