WBEL4 Preview Ready For Testing 265
linuxbeta writes "A preview of WBEL4 (White Box Enterprise Linux) is currently available via BitTorrent. White Box nicely fills the niche between Fedora and RHEL. WBEL Sreenshots. WBEL FAQ. With this latest White Box Enterprise Linux release, is it time to walk away from RHEL?" Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.
CentOS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Differences between Whitebox, CentOS, Tao? (Score:5, Informative)
What distinguishes Whitebox and Tao from CentOS? As far as I've been able to tell, they're all just blatant imitators of RHEL, but CentOS appears to have the largest community (and therefore, the greatest prospect of actually being around in five years).
So: why bother with Whitebox or Tao?
Re:Will it be free?` (Score:2, Informative)
It is important to note... (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Other flavors... CentOS & TaoLinux (Score:4, Informative)
CentOS at http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org] and probably TaoLinux at http://www.taolinux.org/ [taolinux.org] will also follow suit with a new release.
One interesting software release that takes advantage of North-American Linux Enterprise distribution, is Asterisk@home, which comes with a recent CentOS 3.4 build. Spin your own VoIP infrastrucutre from http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:It is important to note... (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Will it be free?` (Score:5, Informative)
img-timeline (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, this very article announced whitebox finnaly got RHEL4 rebuilt, yet the CentOS team had it finished over a month ago, and I'll be putting my first live instance of it in production on monday.
Re:What about kernel compatibility? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Looks like WBEL is being discontinued... (Score:1, Informative)
whitebox torrent... (Score:2, Informative)
in case it goes down (little slow) hopefully tracker doesn't go with it...
Re:Looks like WBEL is being discontinued... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WBEL vs Fedora vs CentOS (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know the difference between WBEL/CentOS, they are very much alike. CentOS seems to have a larger community behind it, perhaps.
Redhat will EOL FC3 in about 9 months. After that you'll get some sort of community support for a while. The community will have to fix everything by hand. Since a new version of FC happens every 6 months or so and each version will require a new team to look after it I wouldn't assume this would go on for too long
RH will EOL RHEL4 in about 5 years. WBEL/CentOS are just recompiled version of RHEL with the trademarked stuff removed. Support will consist of recompiling the RH official fixes, which is much more likely to happen.
If you are running some kind of server where desktop prettiness is not that important, where stability is paramount but can't afford RHEL because it's in your basement, go for WBEL/CentOS. If you want to keep getting the newest stuff on your desktop and don't mind upgrading fairly frequently (every 6 months to a year) then go for FC.
Re:CentOS (Score:4, Informative)
Satellite and Proxy (Score:3, Informative)
We're doing a Satellite deployment here, which allows us to do one click provisioning of servers with known package profiles, including our own in house developed packages. It means that instead of relying on people passing command lines around within the organisation to do production upgrades (since each project within our engineering dept packages slightly differently), now it will all go through one interface.
When we build out a DR site in a different data center, we'll probably put an RHN proxy server there to help ease bandwidth usage across a WAN link for updating servers. It'll allow us to continue to manage everything centrally, but only have to push updates across the WAN once.
Redhat support is also not insignificant. When I have wonky issues with boxes, now I have someplace I can call and get support from people who can actually fix bugs and get me updated packages. Moreover I have SLA commitments on those updates.