Free clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux have been increasingly left behind by the Debian-based Ubuntu, primarily because of the up-to-date nature of the latter.
For example, Red Hat’s RHEL 5, on which most of the free clones such as CENTOS are based, was released almost four years ago. In comparison, Ubuntu refreshes itself every six month.
However, for RHEL fans who don’t want the official support, Scientific Linux has just been launched on the base of the latest RHEL release — the RHEL 6 released in November last year.
Scientific Linux, created by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Sunday released the beta for its CD-based live installer for its Scientific Linux 6. In comparison, the primary RHEL clone, CENTOS, is yet to even hit the first stage of ‘alpha’ for the ‘6’ release. No date has yet been set for CENTOS 6 either.