On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 14:45 -0700, bruce wrote:

hi...

new to centos, but i have a few questions...

i understand that centos is a derivative of rhel, created from the exact/underluing source files used to create rhel.

CentOS is not in any way associated with, affiliated with, or supported by Red Hat, Inc. CentOS is built from open source SRPMS. Here is where we get the RPMS that we build:

http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/

and

http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/

if this is the case, is it possible to get the actual source SRPMS for either RHEL, or for CentOS?

See the above links for the upstream SRPMS that we use and for CentOS SRPMS (the ones we actually build from ... we first remake the and resign the point of origin SRPMS {change the ones that are required}):

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/

(we have several Repositories ... each one has an SRPMS directory)

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/Readme.txt

I used to see the source files on the redaht system, but I don't seem to see them anymore...

i'm curious to know what's better, using CentOS, or the latest fedora FC version...

That depends on what you want (enterprise software or latest/greatest), see this article:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf

thanks

-bruce bedouglas@earthlink.net

Thanks, Johnny Hughes

On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 02:45:39PM -0700, bruce enlightened us:

new to centos, but i have a few questions...

i understand that centos is a derivative of rhel, created from the exact/underluing source files used to create rhel. if this is the case, is it possible to get the actual source SRPMS for either RHEL, or for CentOS?

I used to see the source files on the redaht system, but I don't seem to see them anymore...

Correct, the only changes are what are necessary for legal purposes, or on occasion to make things build correctly. These should be clearly marked with "centos" in the package release, the exception being the kernel packages.

Source RPMs are available for RedHat from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/

and CentOS SRPMS are available from http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/

i'm curious to know what's better, using CentOS, or the latest fedora FC version...

Depends on what you want. CentOS is much more tested and stable. The disadvantage is that most things are more-or-less "frozen" (with security and bug fixes backported) at certain versions where Fedora often gets the latest and greatest.

Matt