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.
Discontinued?? (Score:1)
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As opposed to paying someone to upgrade to the latest version of Scientific Linux?
$10 to change that string for you (Score:2)
If they really want to pay someone, they can pay me ten bucks. It's just changes a few strings. (It's exactly the same code). Probably the easiest way is to use RPM
rpm -e sl_release
rpm -i centos-release*.rpm
As always, you should have a nightly backup just in case anything happens.
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ROTFL. Many of those "scientists" contributed to the development of linux in general and the specific packages in SL in particular, and honestly, this is a good move. It is silly to have a huge stack of derivatives of RHEL -- fedora and CENTOS are plenty. After all, the only real question is doing the necessary builds on the RPM repository in ANY distribution, and it is actually a lot simpler if you keep it close to the mainline development trees. CENTOS is perfect for those who are very conservative an
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Great comments. They clearly demonstrate that you actually have no idea what an o/s is, or what this is talking about doing.
0. Are you under the delusion that an organization like Fermilab does *not* have a team of sysadmins who administer Linux on their servers and clusters of servers?
1. Who do you think was building Scientific Linux?
2. yum update is how you deal with updates. It's an actual
package manager.
3. You. Do. Not. move to a new full release without a complete re
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Have you paid for CentOS? If you did, you got scammed.
Or contributed to the CentOS project
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It is absolutely possible to flip a genuine RHEL install to CentOS and presumably Scientific Linux and flip a Scientific Linux install to CentOS. I have personally done both. First because no longer wanted to pay the RHEL subscription fee. The second because I wanted to standardize on CentOS.
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Scientific Linux is plain old CentOS with curated package clusters of common applications scientists find useful easily installable. So yeah, it's easy to "flip" to using just CentOS, all you have to do is keep using the (likely ) CentOS sources from install in yum. As an added bonus, all repositories that are for CentOS work just fine for SL, since it is literally just CentOS.
Hell, even the greeter says CentOS on the login screen instead of Scientific Linux, and has for at least the last six months or so.
Re: Discontinued?? (Score:1)
CentOS? (Score:2)
Re:CentOS? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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\sarcasm:off
I wondered, but this is Slashdot..
\sarcasim:on
Re:CentOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong RedHat do **NOT** own CentOS. The RedHat cloud division which is separate from the RHEL division has for several years now employed the main CentOS developers full time to maintain CentOS. However that does not mean they own it. Further the CentOS developers have no more access to the internal RHEL repositories and build systems than they had before they where employed by RedHat.
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Just in case you missed the AC's reply:
"The ownership of the CentOS trademarks, along with the requirement that the board have a majority of Red Hat employees makes it clear that, for all the talk of partnership and joining forces, this is really an acquisition by Red Hat. The CentOS project will live on, but as a subsidiary of Red Hat—much as Fedora is today."
-https://lwn.net/Articles/579551/
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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
Scientific Linux and CentOS both RHEL (Score:4, Informative)
CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Going CentOS is how you do RHEL without support fees.
Re: Scientific Linux and CentOS both RHEL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mind handing over money to RedHat, because they contribute so much to opensource software.
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>"I don't mind handing over money to RedHat, because they contribute so much to opensource software."
Agreed. Despite some things (systemd), RedHat has given more back to the Linux community than perhaps any other company. They are absolutely one of the "good guys".... it shows, and it is why they continue to be popular and successful. I have machines that run RHEL and others that run CentOS and also Fedora. Aside from a few hiccups in the past, RedHat has tolerated and then accepted CentOS and has ac
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It would be nice to have an alternative that isn't in LP's - I mean RH's - pocket, but I can see why they made the decision.
Anybody remember White Box Linux? There was a really good document about how the dude created it. Probably still have the disks somewhere.
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Like Poette...
is there a Godwins law about systemd?
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I thought that Kubernetes was really Google's pet project. Red Hat really wants people to use Openstack as their containerization management solution instead.
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Re:Scientific Linux and CentOS both RHEL (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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".
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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.
Re:Scientific Linux and CentOS both RHEL (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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. :-)
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Interestingly IBM's Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments product is delivered as a SuSE based VM. One wonders if that will be changing to RHEL in future. Mind you their ESS product is RHEL based, but you have to muck about getting the licenses for that separately.
I expect RHEL to be rebranded as "Spectrum Linux" or something similar in the future.
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There are clearly a lot of uninformed idiots commenting here. Scientific Linux is an independent rebuild of RHEL. It is most emphatically not a fork of CentOS.
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Scientific Linux is an independent rebuild of RHEL. It is most emphatically not a fork of CentOS
Not for quite some time. Here's the "SL" repo list I have enabled from install:
* base: centos.mirrors.tds.net
* epel: mirror.layeronline.com
* extras: centos.mirrors.tds.net
* nux-dextop: mirror.li.nux.ro
* remi-safe: mirror.bebout.net
* updates: centos.mirrors.tds.net
For being an "independent rebuild of RHEL" they seem to like using CentOS mirrors for the base system.
All SL really is these days is sets of scripts to pull in specific package sets at install time for for di
Why not Debian? (Score:3)
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Ever since Debian was been poisoned with Red Hat's crapware, it's not exactly a huge step up from RH anyway.
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What? Can you explain it? (links are very welcome :-)
look up something called systemd (Score:1)
look up something called systemd
Re: Why not Debian? (Score:1)
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.
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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.
Why is there nothing on the Scientific site? (Score:2)
Yeah, there is a report, but...
DUNE (Score:2)
Just imagine ... (Score:3)
Oh yeah ....
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Just imagine... not having to deal with distributions. At all.
Everything tastes like chicken. Because that's the only thing the Matrix knows.
"Org has to do some hard work!" news shocker! (Score:1)