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Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#511

Post by pezezin »

dralley wrote: post #109
joana035 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the price one pays are outdated packages. CentOS 8 was released few days ago with kernel 4.18, which not even LTS is, and is older than the current Debian stable kernel(!). If you need to install anything besides the base distro you need elrepo, epel, etc which I'm not sure can be counted as part of the support.

RHEL kernel versions are basically incomparable with vanilla kernel versions. They have hardware support and occasionally entire new features that have been backported from newer kernels in addition to the standard security & stability patches. This means that RHEL 7 using a "kernel version" from 2014 will still work fine with modern hardware for which drivers didn't even exist in 2014.

No, it doesn't. I will tell you my experience.

They bought some fancy new computers at work. Our procedures say to use CentOS 7, so we tried it, it ran like shit. Then we reinstalled CentOS 8, same. It worked, but the desktop was extremely slow. After much hair pulling I found the solution: add the elrepo-kernel repository, and update to kernel 5.x

No amount of backporting magic will make an old kernel work like a new kernel.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#512

Post by 8draco8 »

andi999 wrote: post #492
Keverw wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me about how people don't even give CockroachDB a chance because of it's name. Every time it's mentioned on HN, people can't help but to bring up it's name.

I think it is bad. You just cannot go to your manager and PR and tell them we are using CockroachDB. If you have a manager who would understand this though, then your manager still cannot go to his manager with that name.

While you at it tell your manager how many plugins your putting in your Gimp.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#513

Post by 8draco8 »

znpy wrote: post #368
tinus_hn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same happens with GIMP, it’s just not smart marketing.

in GIMP's defense, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, whereas names as Red Hat, Ubuntu and many others are not acronyms

Let's face it, idea for using word "gimp" probably came before they figured out what it stands for. Even now when everyone understands what that means and what consequences are behind using that word, there is still a lot of debate around that name and instead of changing it to something more marketable they are stubborn and are sticking to it. They even allow for bigger market fragmentation (Glimpse fork of GIMP) just to not change that name, that's childish.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#514

Post by llarsson »

oefrha wrote: post #476
commandertso wrote: post #409

One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.

When I was at Princeton, a lot of clusters ran Springdale Linux[1], which is a Princeton/IAS version of RHEL compiled from RHEL source. I wonder why they didn't simply choose CentOS, and if there's any institution outside Princeton using Springdale. Btw: it doesn't seem to have been ported to RHEL 8 (?). [1] http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

They address that particular question even before the FAQ on their site:

"This project was started long before CentOS or other projects were available."

I bet the have calculated that their work maintaining this is rather simple and well-worth it, or they would have changed over to CentOS a long time ago.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#515

Post by 8draco8 »

jlgaddis wrote: post #424
matt-attack wrote: post #418

Can someone explain why it’s not exceedingly simple to clone the existing Centos concept? Isn’t all the code that does the builds, artwork replacement, etc all open source? I would think that rebranding CentOS as Rocky is a rather trivial process of replatforming all the codebase and replacing any “Centos” with “Rocky”.

No kidding, right!? I mean, if you think about it, all that's really needed is for a "s/CentOS/Rocky/g" over all of the repositories. Then, the other 99% of the project is just waiting for the packages to rebuild and get sync'd on all of the mirrors that they could just will into existence with their minds. Really, though, let's be honest here: If they weren't spending so much time writing up press releases and comme…

But seriously, can somebody ELI5 this project. If Centos is just 1:1 RHEL with removed branding then what new bugs will show up in Centos that are result of that rebranding and will not be fixed by RHEL devs? Is there a code in RHEL that is also copy writed which had to replaced and maintained by Centos devs? What am I missing?

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#516

Post by macksd »

not2b wrote: post #327
macksd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I would have thought that the GPL ensures that the customer can then freely redistribute them I'm actually surprised Red Hat has typically shipped SRPMS in bulk to it's customers. I think it's rare that customers would use them, and the GPL allows Red Hat to be far less accomodating. It allows you to charge for each copy of the source code you convey, it doesn't need to be in such a convenient form, it doesn't nee…

The requirement to distribute source means you have to provide the exact source for any binary that you distributed, for three years. And the source is defined as " the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". A pointer to the upstream tarball plus a poorly organized directory with 58 patches in it isn't "the preferred form of the work ...". SRPMs are an easy way to make sure that you got it right,…

I don't disagree, but I've seen other open-source companies view the tarball as their source release and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if you could at least make enough of an argument to get a judge to go along with it long enough to make it prohibitively expensive to reverse.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#517

Post by dnautics »

bigbubba wrote: post #392
cashsterling wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it... Cockroaches are survivors. When I was in grad school my lab was in a subbasement in a 100 year old building. We had huge cockroaches... One of my colleagues caught some and put them in one of our lab freezers and forgot about them. Months later we remembered the jar... took it out of the freezer. Cockroaches thawed out and seemed to be fine... very active, almost like nothing happened. Other experiments…

Diatomaceous earth is very effective at killing them. It's fascinating that they're so robust, but just a little inert powder can kill them. Though to be fair, at their scale, it may as well be a pile of razor blades.

One drop of dichloromethane does them in super fast. Their body metabolizes it into Carbon monoxide. A bit of a wake up call for those of us using dcm (our bodies do too, but less quickly)

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#518

Post by SyzygistSix »

GTP wrote: post #481
znpy wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ubuntu". It's widely accepted nowadays, it was pretty weird in 2004. I got my fair share of jokes in 2005-2007 from friends when talking about that "ubuntu" thing, and I'll spare you the examples.

"Ubuntu" is an African word that means "I'm not able to install Debian" :D

This is the best Linux joke I've ever heard.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#519

Post by Darmody »

globular-toast wrote: post #500
Darmody wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thinking back to early CentOS days... My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you...Rocky Linux" — Gregory Kurtzer, Founder

What is an "H/T"?

Hat tip.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#520

Post by stjohnswarts »

kondbg wrote: post #179

Devil's advocate: why should I choose this yet-to-exist distribution over something already existing, such as Oracle Linux? The most common argument (Oracle is evil and litigious. Therefore, using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued) honestly seems like FUD. All RHEL downstream distributions rebuild the same SRPMs that RHEL provides. Doing a quick comparison over some common packages (kernel, httpd, openssl, et…

Why not use SUSE then? Oracle is the last option that I would ever trust. They always have something up their sleeve
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