CentOS and Fedora Core 3

So lately, at work, I've been fiddling with CentOS 4. CentOS is a group of developers who took the sources of RedHat Enterprise Linux (which Redhat is required to distribute freely, by the GPL), and recompiled them into a distribution that's completely binary compatible with RHEL.

This is nice, because you can't even get the real RHEL without paying a fortune to Red Hat in support costs, and RHEL has a nice long development cycle, so CentOS is good for servers and other systems that you don't want to have to upgrade constantly.

Both CentOS and Fedora Core 3 use the new yum package update software, which is greatly improved. They seem like solid systems, even if the out-of-the-box experience isn't as nice as SuSE. The nice thing about Linux is you can customize the system infinitely; try that with closed-source Windows and you'll have a hard time!

The semester break will be busy, upgrading our multitude of user workstations from FC2 to FC3. Server upgrades will probably happen in the break before next Fall; that is not going to be pleasant...