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Operating Systems Linux Technology

Scientific Linux Distro is Being Discontinued; The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and CERN Will Move To CentOS (betanews.com) 94

Scientific Linux, a 14-year-old operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and which was maintained by some significant members of the scientific community such as The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and CERN, is being discontinued. From a report: While current versions (6 and 7) will continue to be supported, future development has permanently ended, with the organizations instead turning to CentOS -- another distro based on RHEL. "Scientific Linux is driven by Fermilab's scientific mission and focused on the changing needs of experimental facilities. Fermilab is looking ahead to DUNE and other future international collaborations. One part of this is unifying our computing platform with collaborating labs and institutions," said James Amundson, Head of Scientific Computing Division, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
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Scientific Linux Distro is Being Discontinued; The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and CERN Will Move To CentOS

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  • OMG! EVIL! Now they have to pay $$ to upgrade!! Oh wait, this is Linux, so for some reason, people here feel that doesn't count.
    • Dude, go to some website where you belong. It isn't here. Nobody has to pay to switch to CentOS idiot. Not only that What they are using now continues to work just fine. They aren't deleting the current SL version of the users systems, moron.
  • Does not compute
    • Re:CentOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @02:08PM (#58484804)

      CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise... They take the "up line vendor's" source code (which GNU license requires they release), remove the Red Hat copyrighted branding and patching stuff to build a clone. It generally installs and runs exactly like Red Hat Enterprise, just with different graphics and branding.

      Generally it "computes" just as well as Red Hat, albeit with a bit of delay in the availability of patches and no paid support from Red Hat (though others surely offer similar services based on CentOS).

      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        It was a joke.
      • by leonbev ( 111395 )

        That's how is used to work, before Red Hat took over maintaining the CentOS packages themselves. Honestly, they've been doing a better job at maintaining CentOS better than the original team did, with quicker release of security and application packages than when it was just maintained by volunteers.

        That said, there is some concern with how interested IBM will be in continuing this maintenance, and how much they will push customers to upgrade to RHEL for certain "premium" features and support. Losing Scient

    • by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @02:12PM (#58484832)
      Scientific Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
      CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
      Going CentOS is how you do RHEL without support fees.
      • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @02:38PM (#58485076) Journal

        I didn't understand the purpose of Scientific Linux for this reason, it seemed like a rebranded CentOS with a slightly different default package selection...not a difference worth maintaining another distro over.

        • I didn't understand the purpose of Scientific Linux for this reason, it seemed like a rebranded CentOS with a slightly different default package selection...not a difference worth maintaining another distro over.

          Think of it as an internal IT project. A RHEL configured with the apps and utilities the organization needs. It makes managing and configuring machines easier for the IT folks. Why distro rather than disk image? Maybe collaborating with other similar scientific organizations was the motivation. In any case I don't think this was intended for the general public, just a niche community. As such I think we may be reading in too much due to the word "distro".

          • Right, a data science workload is going to gain from different tunings than a general-purpose desktop.

            That said, since CentOS can enable arbitrary repos and even offer custom kernels these days, doing the entire distro maintenance is just duplication. Spend that effort on a better repo.

        • by jabuzz ( 182671 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @04:24PM (#58485808) Homepage

          CentOS and Scientific Linux where both started at the same time in response to RedHat moving to preventing distribution of their binaries for free. There where a number of others RHEL rebuilds back in the day. TaoLinux and White Box Linux being ones I remember. Also early versions of Scientific Linux including some extra packages over RHEL. The one that sticks in my mind the most is Alpine (a free version of the Pine email client), and some packages that would setup for a serial console.

          Over time most of the other RHEL rebuilds threw in the towel as CentOS gathered the momentum. They often closed down with instructions on how to flip your install to CentOS.

          The writing has been on the wall for some time now for Scientific Linux, basically ever since CERN threw the towel in and said they would be using CentOS from 7.0 onwards, leaving Fermilab to do all the work. With the RHEL 8 release imminent I am not in the least bit surprised. There is only 18 months left for RHEL6 and it's rebuilds, and personally if I was Fermilab I would say starting with RHEL 7.7 Scientific Linux will be flipping to CentOS, here's the instructions on how to flip. It's not very hard you can probably find instructions if you Google it.

          That said at least with Scientific Linux 6.x you could stay pinned at specific point releases just like real RHEL. I am not sure that is true with version 7.x of Scientific Linux as I have never used it.

        • by khb ( 266593 )

          https://www.scientificlinux.or... [scientificlinux.org] explains the history and rationale. I think your analysis (which has been equally true for a few years) is probably spot on which is why they are cancelling future work. Funny that the SCL site doens't mention this critical future info. I'd have thought they'd tell their community first and the press second.

          That said, one can image the Fermi (and possibly Cern will rejoin) might have a repo of their own with suitably patched compilers, schedulers and other fiddly bits which

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        To be honest, I sort of weep for RHEL's future, and by extension the rest of the RHEL based distros, and here's why:

        Red Hat was bought by IBM. IBM is notorious for fucking over "their customers" and everyone else who they encounter. They are every bit as shady towards them as Oracle is. I full expect, at some point, that IBM will do more and more to push out the "for free" people like CentOS, much like Oracle did when they forked RHEL for their flavor of Linux, like they did for the MySQL folks, and also

        • by ebh ( 116526 )

          My heart sank when I heard RH was bought by IBM. I worked with ClearCase starting when the developers at Atria would take my calls. Things were still OK when they were part of Rational after a few intermediate buyouts. But when IBM got hold of them, the whole thing went to hell. ClearCase still did what ClearCase always did, for better or for worse, but dealing with IBM's sales and support people was a dystopian nightmare of ever-changing personnel, processes, licensing schemes, and magic numbers needed to

        • To be honest, I sort of weep for RHEL's future ...

          Well there will always be CentOS, or a fork, if things go really bad with RHEL. :-)

  • by fbobraga ( 1612783 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @02:11PM (#58484824) Homepage
    plenty of software support...
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 )

      Ever since Debian was been poisoned with Red Hat's crapware, it's not exactly a huge step up from RH anyway.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Plenty of commercial software is only supported on RHEL (and sometimes SLES) and CentOS is binary compatible (built from the same sources with the same settings).

      You run a RHEL license on one machine and all others run CentOS for free. If you run into problems on one of the CentOS machines you recreate the problem on the RHEL machine and complain to Red Hat and the vendor to fix it.

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Try installing Spectrum Protect Server on a CentOS machine. Let me know how that works out for you. Quick hint it won't install unless you make a dummy redhat-release-server package and install it which you won't find on a CentOS machine for trademark reasons. In the past you could just fake it with /etc/redhat-release but the checks are now more in depth.

  • Yeah, there is a report, but...

  • The spice must flow.
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @03:24PM (#58485452)

    ... trying to switch between different Windows distributions because one was no longer to your liking or properly supported.

    Oh yeah ....

  • Most of us have to take part in several huge projects in our IT careers, so why the fuss over this? I appreciate you may lose your own direct linkage to RHEL but CentOS is a solid foundation to build on. CentOS has such a huge reputation and the org is not likely disappear any time soon, it's going to be easier to shift to that as you have a common base than trying to port over to one of the Ubuntu base distros. Storm in a teacup.

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