Red Hat Enterprise Server 6 was released a couple of months back (in November 2010, if memory serves). I liked the look of it (basically, Fedora 12 with a lot of Enterprise-class stability added), but was looking forward to trying it out for free when Centos 6 was released. Two months later, however, and there’s still no real sign of an actual Centos 6 (though this post on the developer’s list suggests that there should be a beta available Real Soon Now).
Not wanting to wait any further, therefore, I installed Scientific Linux 6 the other day. It’s only available as an Alpha version (number 8 or 9, I believe) and I got my cope here. Alpha or not, it seems pretty stable to me, and I recommend it.
Scientific Linux is another one of those distros which are built from the original Red Hat source code, once various trademarks and logos have been removed. It’s therefore practically binary-equivalent to the “real thing”, but is made available for zero cost, and updates are available from standard repositories without payment. If you care about such things, the distro gets its name from the fact that CERN and Fermilab (amongst others) use it: true geekdom indeed!
Oracle installs on it fine, incidentally.
Getting Flash working is a bit of a trial (nothing new there, then). Basically, the download from Adobe is a 32-bit library (called libflashplayer.so) which you unzip and then copy (to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins). But you also have to issue (as root) the following command:
yum installnspluginwrapper.i686alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686
Once you re-start Firefox (version 3.6.13 after a yum update, if you’re wondering), you’ll be able to watch the videos on (for example) the BBC News website -my standard Flash test!- without a problem.
To install other packages to the thing which aren’t in the “standard” repositories, such as Stellarium, I simply followed the instructions here about adding the RPMForge repository. Binary compatibility is a wonderful thing -it means the instructions, though ostensibly meant for Centos, apply to Scientific Linux perfectly well, too.
Anyway: Scientific Linux. If you’re at all concerned that Centos seems to be losing a bit of its mojo, it’s a viable alternative!
Hi, thanks for the tip. I did not know that Distro was also RHEL-based. I remember you have had VMWare Server working on one of your previous CentOS install. Since VMWare Server 2.0.2 does not work on CentOS 5.4 and above (waiting for the coming CentOS 6?), I’d be curious to know if you have by any chance try VMWare Server on Scientific Linux as well ?
Thanks,
Nicolas.
Short answer, Nicolas: no. If I’m doing virtualisation on Linux hosts these days, I use VirtualBox. If I’m doing bare-metal virtualisation, I use VMware ESXi. Sorry.
Scientific linux 5.5 work well width VMWare Server 2.0.2, you need to copy some Linux Library from SL 5.3 and modify manually one file.
But SL6 have problem to install his modules lime vmmon vmnet …
I think, VMWare have stop the support for Vmware Server.
ESXi is a good idea, if it support your hardware.
Thank you Tomas. VMware Server is indeed scheduled for ‘end of life’ around about now, in fact. ESXi is indeed a very nice bare metal solution, but as you say, it can be a bit picky about what hardware it’s prepared to run on. Personally, I like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox as desktop virtualisation solutions and ESXi or (gulp) Hyper-V if I want bare-metal solutions. I never really used VMware Server, as it seemed to fall between my two usage cases.
Indeed, VMWare Server 2.0.2 stopped to work (without workaround) properly on CentOS5.4 and above. Since I was heavily using VMWare Server, it was a pitty to see the end of life of that product without any hope to get it better.
Probably time to go for a “more” server class virtualization software like a bare-metal solution such as ESXi. It needs to be investigated.
Thanks,
Nicolas.