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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

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.

playcache 6y ago
Don't they use scientific linux (CentOS clone?)
- toyg 6y ago
  SL died some time ago.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Scientific Linux has been abandoned in favor of CentOS.
- simonh 6y ago
  Scientific was discontinued and the sponsoring organisations switched to CentOS 8. It looks like the work involved in rebuilding RHEL 8 was too much to deal with.
fifnir 6y ago
Indeed we're running CentOS on the cluster at work. I always wondered, why not Debian ?
- corty 6y ago
  Support. Commercial software packages that you may want to run often come with a list of supported operating systems which usually only includes RedHat and maybe SuSE. Ubuntu and Debian are rarely officially supported. And although you usually can get things to work somehow, your application software support will be useless because all tickets get closed with "unsupported OS, use RedHat". With CentOS you at least might have a chance to get a non-useless answer from you application's support team.
oefrha 6y ago
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/ http://springdale.math.ias.edu/
- fooblat 6y ago
  They don't have a dvd iso for Springdale 8 but there is a boot.iso download and a package repo[1] 1. https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/ https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/
- llarsson 6y ago
  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.

playcache 6y ago

Don't they use scientific linux (CentOS clone?)

toyg 6y ago
SL died some time ago.
cbmuser 6y ago
Scientific Linux has been abandoned in favor of CentOS.
simonh 6y ago
Scientific was discontinued and the sponsoring organisations switched to CentOS 8. It looks like the work involved in rebuilding RHEL 8 was too much to deal with.

fifnir 6y ago

Indeed we're running CentOS on the cluster at work. I always wondered, why not Debian ?

corty 6y ago
Support. Commercial software packages that you may want to run often come with a list of supported operating systems which usually only includes RedHat and maybe SuSE. Ubuntu and Debian are rarely officially supported. And although you usually can get things to work somehow, your application software support will be useless because all tickets get closed with "unsupported OS, use RedHat". With CentOS you at least might have a chance to get a non-useless answer from you application's support team.

oefrha 6y ago

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/ http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

fooblat 6y ago
They don't have a dvd iso for Springdale 8 but there is a boot.iso download and a package repo[1] 1. https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/ https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/
llarsson 6y ago
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.