White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) is an attempt to fill the void left by Red Hat’s decision to become a purely commercial product. It’s not without problems, but but it does a bridge the functionality gap between the Fedora Project and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Review: White Box fills niche between Fedora and RHEL
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This shows how open source empowers organizations. It’s impressive for a library to figure out their own solution rather than simply wait or pay for someone else to do it.
…but it does a bridge… in the news snippet should be:
but it does bridge
Thanks.
also see http://www.centos.org for the centos project, which does the same and according to people is better in the support area..
thats true. centos has more people working on it unlike whitebox with just a single person. updates are faster with centos and it works more reliably
WBEL does have a few problems. Updating was a bit of a problem sometimes, because the servers kept timing out and saying they were busy. WBEL obviously does not have the bandwidth that Red Hat or SUSE have.
Geez, use a mirror. I’d hardly consider that a “problem”.
Cheers
I also hear Tao linux is pretty good in this regard (RHEL sources compiled – the RH logos). Professor friend of mine at a local college has been intergrating it into some of the network over there, seems rather pleased with it.
Another RHEL rebuild is X/OS from this site
http://www.xoslinux.org
I haven’t tried it thought….
Finding typos in a thick book (e.g. “Unix unleashed”) is understandable. However, when an article is published (either in a printed magazine or on the web), I expect both the author and the editor to proofread it. If they don’t have time to do it, they could ask for help. Reading a paper full of typos is like listening to a drunk kid : it’s tiresome.
Typos shouldnt be in any book. I really doubt any of these articles, books, or magazines were written in anything but a word processing program that didnt have a rubimentary spell check. Its not hard to run one.
A common mistake is to rely on spell checkers to point out everything. spell checkers are NOT capable of checking out whether you mean “whether” or “weather”.
I would say that almost every major book has a spelling mistake somewhere
My favorite of the RHEL rebuilds is Scientific Linux. It is not just a rebuild; it adds a lot of extra packages and functionality that even RHEL does not provide. For instance it offers OpenAFS clients, servers, and kernel modules. It offers the option to use apt/synaptic to completely replace the slow yum/up2date. It also offers the xfs file system kernel modules. (The XFS filesystem is a very high performance filesystem developed by SGI). These are the tip of the iceberg, but they are also the most notable. Cheers
Oh, by the way, scientific linux is available at https://www.scientificlinux.org
Articles posted on the web were most likely written in a CMS. The ones I’ve seen don’t have spell checkers.
Now to WBEL. It is slow comming out with updates. They don’t even have update 3 yet. I think WBEL is cool because it is the first RHEL alternative I found. But now I might switch to Centos because of the updates.
And just for the fun of it, here is a (possibly incomplete) list of various distros claiming to be nothing more and nothing less than recompiled Red Hat Enterprise… it kind of amazes me there are so many, considering the narrow scope of their mission:
– whitebox
– tao
– centos/caos
– lineox
– scientifc linux
– fermi linux
– startcom
– pie box
– eadem
As one of the many Redhat Linux’s refugees, I too searched for server OS alternatives when Redhat EOL’d their RH73/RH8/RH9 a while back:
* Fedora is too unstable (fast-changing), not suited for servers;
* RHEL is not free, so you can’t use it at home; this is a big problem for me.
Instead of looking for RHEL clones, I finally turned to Debian and was quite delighted. You get stability (at least 3-5 years per major release, plus it’s easy to upgrade between releases!), you get security updates, you get a high standard QA, you get peace of mind.
So if you are also in my position, give Debian a try. Some people dismiss Debian because it’s not RPM-based, it’s not “blessed” by vendors like IBM/Oracle, or they heard that Debian contains software with “old versions”. But give it a second chance and play with it for a week or two. Most likely you won’t be disappointed, especially if you’re looking for a stable OS which you can install and just leave alone after that.
RHEL is not free, so you can’t use it at home
Correction: of course you can, you just need to pay for it 🙂 I personally would rather pay for a copy of Windows 2000 though, because there are so many free Linux distro out there…
The reason a lot of people are looking for a RHEL clone is the same reason my company uses lineox. We want something that will run applications that are certified to run only on RHEL (Like some versions of Oracle)
Right now we can barely afford Oracle, and I know I can use MySql etc but we have custom applications that only run on Oracle at this time.
I wish that versions of Linux like Debian had a true stable version that companies like Oracle would want to certify against, but until that happens I have to go with the real deal or something very close.
Just a gentle reminder. When you “purchase” a copy of redmond you do not “own” it. You are, in the most literal sense, renting it. Read the EULA.
There are many ways in which it can be sold to you, but, it basically revolves around the OEM and the retail versions. One stays with the equipment it was sold with our stays on one machine until you move it.
You can, like the case of our campus, obtain one of the forms of campus agreements. It allows for a certain number of computers to be under one license number but the computers must be audited and known.
Seven hundrend dollars, give or take a dollar and excluding Uncle Sam’s cut, may be fine for a student, an individual, a small one-or-two person operation, but the cost for a larger operation like a college campus can be very pricey. Several hundred thousand dollars as a bare minimum.
I am an advocate of being a good steward of the public money, which, by-the-way, comes from mine and other peoples annual property and other local taxes and bond revenues.
If a school district can replace a costly agreement with a low cost and extremely viable alternative, then I would support them. Saving several hundred thousand dollars translates into jobs, equipment, or maintenance.
Well, just my two pennies.
What about asianux?
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/20/HNasianux_1.html
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/04/08/01/1627257.shtml
I think it is free.
I mean if the only reason you try whitebox is to run oracle and don’t want to pay redhat and suse, why not try asianux? I think it is free. Maybe I am wrong.
The way I see it, RedHat has made the decision that it wants to charge people for a stable, well supported OS. There is nothing wrong with that decision since many other companies do the same. Now you can go along with this and pay for RedHat Linux or you can move towards a truly free distribution like Debian. But you should never choose to use a cheap immitation as this will eventually kill the parent distribution.
Debian is a self-sufficient Linux distribution. It has it’s own community, members, developers, and reason for existence. It is very well organized. By choosing Debian, you are choosing a system that is free in “Beer” and “Speech”. You will be building infrastructure on it, training new talent to use it, increasing it’s popularity and development community, and eventually forcing companies like Oracle to target it.
By choosing a cheap RedHat knock off, you are in essence supporting a leech. RedHat’s model requires capital income and these knock-offs do nothing but drain from RedHat’s model. These distros are not selfsustaining and require RedHat to do the majority of development. But at the same time, they harm RedHat’s ability to develop and limit other distributions from becoming more popular. They truly are biting the hand that feeds them.
Please have a little amount of self-respect and dignity and choose a distribution thats contributes more to the world than we are a free as in beer version of the person we are completely dependant on.
I personally would rather pay for a copy of Windows 2000 though, because there are so many free Linux distro out there…
Well, you can try your proposal on EM64T. You won’t get a Windows 2000 for EM64T.
It is both amazing and strange that WBEL became the clone, while Centos and others already started to clone RHEL 2.1, and are actually offering a somewhat better “clone” due to the fact that a group responds better.
It is also pity for those older groups that WBEL now takes all the credits.
yes, you can download Asianux (www.asianux.com) for free, but in order to get the support, you need to buy either Redflag Linux 4.1 or Miracle Linux 3.0, which are all powered by asianux.
Asianux is kind of RHEL3U2 clone, but it has many more features such as XFS, LKCD/LKST, better Chinese/Japanese support.