Gazing at Scientific Linux

"A little while ago someone requested I write a review of Scientific Linux. Intrigued, but not yet motivated, I invited people to write to me and tell me what they found interesting about Scientific. I got a bit more feedback than I'd expected and nearly all of it in favour of the distribution. Apparently several readers find Scientific a good OS for their machines at home and run it on everything from servers, to desktops, to netbooks.... everything except the family toaster. Honestly, I was a bit surprised. Scientific Linux has always struck me as a distro which is aimed at a small community of researchers, finding a quiet niche in the dark server rooms of laboratories. I stand corrected. With a new found curiosity, I ventured over to scientificlinux.org.

"The project's website is a simple display of black and white in a Wiki style. The site is fairly quiet, almost sparse in its presentation. Nonetheless, navigation around the site is straightforward and I found that the latest version, 5.4, comes in Intel 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. This latest release came out in November and is supported through until 2012. The distribution is supplied on a series of eight installation CDs or two DVDs. It's also available as a live CD, which I decided to use for my test drive."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Scientific Linux: A Distro For More Than Labs(Sep 08, 2009)
• A Perfect Illustration of Why I Now Choose Scientific Linux Over CentOS(Aug 10, 2009)
• Scientific Linux 4.8 with SquashFS and UnionFS(Jul 24, 2009)
• Frugal Friday (Podcast): HP Tech Support, Amazon is Big Brother, Apollo 11, Scientific Linux(Jul 18, 2009)
• One Tale of Two Scientific Distros(Sep 03, 2008)
• 42 of the Best Free Linux Scientific Software(Aug 19, 2008)