Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 192.168.1.194]
on October 23, 2007 12:18 PM
"Its developers put in the minimum amount of work required to separate X/OS from Red Hat, but beyond that, added no value to the product."
> "but it lacks any value beyond that offered by Red Hat or CentOS, another distro built from RHEL sources."
You're wrong. Of course they couldn't "separate" from RHEL, as they're supposed to be binary compatible, as the other clones!
Here's my list of relevant advantages over CentOS or Scientific Linux:
1. UP-TO-DATE MEDIA: Being released recently, it has most of the packages up-to-date. When you perform a full install CentOS 5.0 from the DVD or CD-set, you'll have to apply a lot of updates right away! Would you prefer to retrieve something like 500 MB of updates immediately after the install? (You can do it by installing from the CentOS 5.0 DVD.)
2. PRAGMATISM: While CentOS 5.0 was including many "obsolete" packages on the DVD/CDs when released (for the sake of being 100% compatible with RHEL 5.0 <u>as released</u>), X/OS has a much more pragmatical approach, by having the latest available packages (as of August, but anyway). It even has a newer yum, as of RHEL 5.1 Beta! (I had no problems with the newest yum.)
3. MIMICKING: On the other hand, booting with the "askkey" option allows you for an installation that's <u>equivalent</u> with the RHEL flavor of your choice: Client/Desktop (C), Workstation (W), Server (S), Virtualization (V), Cluster (U), Cluster Storage (G). Otherwise, by default all (A) the packages will be available for selection.
The artwork is comparable with CentOS', hence much better than with Scientific Linux, for instance.
Some downsides of using X/OS instead of CentOS or Scientific Linux:
1. There is no such thing as mailing lists, forum, wiki, bugzilla. You won't be able to report bugs (unless you pay for support plans), should they be X/OS-specific and not upstream. You'll have to read the community information sources of CentOS and Scientific Linux, but as long as you won't find reported anything similar with your problem, you can't be sure whether a bug is "upstream" or only in X/OS.
2. The updates are not released as they appear upstream, but in "batches". Oracle and Microsoft are even worse, and they're still in business :-)
I would like you to question the purpose of StartCom Enterprise Linux 5.0: they have the advantage to having released the first (before CentOS), but otherwise they're an 100% clone, no specific advantages added! (They have a small "extras" repo, but it's very, very thin.)
Should you want a DVD cover for X/OS 5.0, check out <a href="http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2007/10/17/20/49/58">here</a> :-)
I forgot to add that the X/OS DVD has a "dvdutils" directory and you can use "dvd2cd" to optionally create CD-ROM images from the DVD.
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X/OS is NOT an undistinguished Red Hat clone!
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 192.168.1.194] on October 23, 2007 12:18 PM> "but it lacks any value beyond that offered by Red Hat or CentOS, another distro built from RHEL sources."
You're wrong. Of course they couldn't "separate" from RHEL, as they're supposed to be binary compatible, as the other clones!
Here's my list of relevant advantages over CentOS or Scientific Linux:
1. UP-TO-DATE MEDIA: Being released recently, it has most of the packages up-to-date. When you perform a full install CentOS 5.0 from the DVD or CD-set, you'll have to apply a lot of updates right away! Would you prefer to retrieve something like 500 MB of updates immediately after the install? (You can do it by installing from the CentOS 5.0 DVD.)
2. PRAGMATISM: While CentOS 5.0 was including many "obsolete" packages on the DVD/CDs when released (for the sake of being 100% compatible with RHEL 5.0 <u>as released</u>), X/OS has a much more pragmatical approach, by having the latest available packages (as of August, but anyway). It even has a newer yum, as of RHEL 5.1 Beta! (I had no problems with the newest yum.)
3. MIMICKING: On the other hand, booting with the "askkey" option allows you for an installation that's <u>equivalent</u> with the RHEL flavor of your choice: Client/Desktop (C), Workstation (W), Server (S), Virtualization (V), Cluster (U), Cluster Storage (G). Otherwise, by default all (A) the packages will be available for selection.
The artwork is comparable with CentOS', hence much better than with Scientific Linux, for instance.
Some downsides of using X/OS instead of CentOS or Scientific Linux:
1. There is no such thing as mailing lists, forum, wiki, bugzilla. You won't be able to report bugs (unless you pay for support plans), should they be X/OS-specific and not upstream. You'll have to read the community information sources of CentOS and Scientific Linux, but as long as you won't find reported anything similar with your problem, you can't be sure whether a bug is "upstream" or only in X/OS.
2. The updates are not released as they appear upstream, but in "batches". Oracle and Microsoft are even worse, and they're still in business :-)
I would like you to question the purpose of StartCom Enterprise Linux 5.0: they have the advantage to having released the first (before CentOS), but otherwise they're an 100% clone, no specific advantages added! (They have a small "extras" repo, but it's very, very thin.)
Should you want a DVD cover for X/OS 5.0, check out <a href="http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2007/10/17/20/49/58">here</a> :-)
I forgot to add that the X/OS DVD has a "dvdutils" directory and you can use "dvd2cd" to optionally create CD-ROM images from the DVD.
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