[Sussex] Activating Red Hat Enterprise Linux

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Stephen Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 10:38 +0100, Jon Fautley wrote:
>   

>> I'd be interested to see how that works.
>>
>> Firstly, a bit of background...
>>
>> The "CentOS is RHEL" thing is a little misleading. You need to remember
>> that one of the really important parts of how a distribution is built
>> is the toolchain and build environment used to physically build the
>> packages.
>>
>> CentOS have a different build environment to Red Hat (because ours is a
>> custom-developed, in house solution). As such, I do not believe that
>> CentOS can claim "100% Binary Compatibility" with RHEL. Sure, they use
>> the same packages (and make a few tweaks), but in terms of how the
>> packages are built, that's a whole different story.
>>
>> (if you want to see how much difference a different toolchain can make,
>> I'm sure there's plenty of Gentoo ricers^Wusers that will be able to
>> explain it to you ;)
>>     
>
> Oi, none of that Microsoft^WRed Hat monopolisation nonsense here!
>
>   
Well, they're not *monopolizing* that. They're just keeping 
non-customers out of the compiled binaries. They're very good about 
providing source, or CentOS and Whitebox linuxes wouldn't exist, and the 
SRPM's for almost everything else are available for free download.

But the steps they take to "manage" their software channels are a 
serious pain, especially since the RedHat Network service on which they 
rely is in the US, with no European mirror, and the webservices are so 
slow and painful as to be unusable. Entirely dynamic content on every 
webpage with poor cross-linking and a Help option that doesn't actually 
let you report problems, anyone?