[CentOS] Is Oracle a real alternative to Centos?

Wed Dec 9 09:29:55 UTC 2020
Gianluca Cecchi <gianluca.cecchi at gmail.com>

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 10:05 AM Karl Vogel <vogelke+centos at pobox.com> wrote:
[snip]

>
> FWIW, my 6.10 installation had this in /etc/redhat-release:
>     Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.10 (Santiago)
>
>
Only to point out that while in CentOS (8.3, but the same in 7.x) the
situation is like this:

[g.cecchi at skull8 ~]$ ll /etc/redhat-release /etc/centos-release
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30 Nov 10 16:49 /etc/centos-release
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Nov 10 16:49 /etc/redhat-release -> centos-release
[g.cecchi at skull8 ~]$

[g.cecchi at skull8 ~]$ cat /etc/centos-release
CentOS Linux release 8.3.2011

in Oracle Linux (eg 7.7) you get two different files:

$ ll /etc/redhat-release /etc/oracle-release
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32 Aug  8  2019 /etc/oracle-release
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 52 Aug  8  2019 /etc/redhat-release

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.7 (Maipo)

$ cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 7.7

This is generally done so that sw pieces officially certified only on
upstream enterprise vendor and that test contents of the redhat-release
file are satisfied.
Using the lsb_release command on an Oracle Linux 7.6 machine:

# lsb_release -a
LSB Version: :core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: OracleServer
Description: Oracle Linux Server release 7.6
Release: 7.6
Codename: n/a
#


Gianluca