Fedora vs RHEL

[Bill Oliver]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2013, Craig White wrote:

>
> Scientific Linux takes all sorts of liberties with build options and
> even their build system doesn't attempt to produce compatible binary
> packages - not that I am suggesting that it's a bad thing - just a
> completely different philosophy than CentOS.
> Craig
>

My impression was that Scientific Linux was essentially an "in-house" enterprise linux derived from Red Hat that was built to fit the needs of a consortium of universities that collaborated a lot -- and thus needed a consistent infrastructure.  While the community at large was welcome to use it, it wasn't built with the general linux community in mind, nor was it built for our convenience.  CentOS *is* developed with the general linux community as the target customer.  But I could be wrong.


But that leads to an interesting question, since both of these are done by compiling the RHEL SRPMs.  Has anybody actually tried compiling RHEL from the source on their boxes?  Is it hard, or just tedious?  I tried doing the linux from scratch thing a couple of years ago just for giggles.  I got it up and running, but decided the hassle wasn't worth it, and it didn't really run noticeably faster.  All this stuff I had read about how a distro compiled and tailored to the box it was to run on would be blindingly faster didn't seem to pan out.  It might have been a *little* faster, but not so's I noticed when it came to subjective interaction.  I guess when you are running KDE with all the eyecandy, blinding speed isn't first priority anyway.  I'll sacrifice a millisecond here or there for the cool rotating cube and wobbly windows.

billo