[CentOS] Wherefore whitebox?

[John Hinton]

Benjamin Smith wrote:

>Well, 
>
>I'm a recent convert from WBEL. My biggest concern with CentOS is that the 
>community here seems to want to be more than a recompile of RHEL. 
>
>But WBEL is floundering, what with Katrina and Rita, and there really being 
>only 1 developer behind it, etc. 
>
>I offer an automated shell script to switch from WBEL4 to CentOS4 (easy, it's 
>hosted on my home DSL line!) It assumes that you've been using yum to perform 
>updates... 
>
>http://chico.benjamindsmith.com/wbel2centos4.sh
>
>How many otther ex-WBEL users are there here? 
>
>-Ben 
>  
>
Ben,

Welcome!

I'm a convert. Early on, Whitebox was IMHO ahead of CentOS. Seems the 
distribution was out faster IIRC. Whitebox possibly did more for the EL 
distros than any other clone. My hat's off to John Morris for providing 
the distro to the world.

Also, being conservative with my servers, early on I had more trust in 
the WBEL release. There were obviously no 'loose cannons'. Meanwhile 
CentOS was forming and chose a great path with great people.

After time, I became unhappy with the update timeframe and made the 
switch to CentOS. CentOS had obviously matured into what it is today. I 
find that releases are plenty timely to suit me. I have in the past done 
updates a bit 'too quickly' from Redhat and been stung a time or two. 
This slight delay is not a drawback in my opinion.

CentOS also seems to be more particular with regards to mirrors, 
excepting only fast connections whereas with Whitebox I would sometimes 
hit a mirror with ISDN-like speeds. I'm not slamming Whitebox at all. I 
am very happy with CentOS and how the group works. I appreciate 'all' 
the clone distros and hope the all survive and thrive. Things do change 
and it is always nice to have options.

Thanks to all involved in doing such fine work and for the donation of 
your time and resources. I'll be making another donation in the near future.

Best Regards,
John Hinton