[CentOS] CentOS versus Scientific

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at 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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com