[TriLUG] Redhat and Proliant DL380G3 - any issues?

[Magnus Hedemark]

On 5 Jan 2004, Jeremy Portzer wrote:

> Keep in mind that you could also get the retail version of RHEL,
> Professional Workstation (?), which is available from places like
> buy.com for around ~$80.  This is a lot less than the $349/year fee for
> RHEL ES.  But it would get you the long life-cycle of RHEL which will be
> handy if this box will be around a while.  There's also the knock-offs
> like WBEL.

If you ever expect to get outside help, RHEL is the only way to go for 
your business.  If you're pretty confident you're going to be able to 
handle issues on your own if you have to, and your management shares your 
confidence, yes there are other options.  

* White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) - A mostly one-man knock off of RHEL 
3.  This is the first one out the door that I'm aware of.  I was initially 
enthused about this but it remains a one man show as the project leader is 
refusing offers of community assistance.  One other guy set up a community 
site, http://whiteboxlinux.net, and rather than being thanked or endorsed 
he was labelled a "squatter" by the WBEL project leader.  I'm not going to 
bet my enterprise network on one man working alone funded by a county 
library in Louisiana.  http://whiteboxlinux.org

* CentOS 3 - I'm more enthused about this project.  It falls under the 
cAos umbrella, but unlike the bleeding edge distro of the same name this 
is just a faithful liberation of the RHEL 3 distribution.  I think their 
"Build 4" release is every bit as stable as WBEL 3 final release, but 
right now they just have small issues with artwork and such and maybe a 
few more instances of Red Hat trademarks to purge.  So on the downside, 
this isn't quite ready yet for wide deployment.  On the upside, there is a 
thriving community behind this distribution and a strong global mirror 
network to make it painless to download.  http://caosity.org

I'm aware of an RHEL-rebuild mailing list but the activity there has 
slowed greatly as most people have gravitated to the two projects I just 
mentioned, or went off to do their own thing (I know of recent efforts to 
convert RHEL to a liberated Chinese distribution, for example).

All of these projects right now owe a lot to Red Hat.  The Linux 
community, perhaps more than any other, is well known for eating its own.  
Heck I've been one of the loud voices criticizing Red Hat for some things 
that shouldn't have gone out the door.  But these projects wouldn't be 
possible if Red Hat weren't so adamant about sticking with the GPL.  Red 
Hat could probably do some crappy things to temporarily trip up these 
projects, but the projects would quickly recover and it would just end up 
earning Red Hat more ill will in the end.  But they haven't done anything 
to trip up or even discourage these projects.  Kudos!

Since these are community based distributions, there is no expressed or 
implied support.  If it breaks, you own both pieces.  If you want 
something more than that, talk to our friends over at http://redhat.com