Scientific Linux 6-RC2 on Inspiron 1525

It’s not that I didn’t like running Debian Squeeze on my laptop, it’s that there was no reason to ever use the laptop since my desktop was identical. I noticed Scientific Linux (SL) was close to releasing their 6.0 and decided to try the latest release candidate. Unlike CentOS, SL runs a beta test program and it is now quite usable.

You can review the series on RHEL 6 for the Clueless (now in a static archive linked here) for most of the details. I’m sure most of that will also apply when CentOS 6.0 comes out later.

There are several other differences between CentOS and SL. It appears CentOS has a much larger user base, and the mailing list archives indicate a rather different kind of user. SL draws the Fermilab-CERN crowd, naturally, as that’s where it’s produced. The users of CentOS include a much larger group of rowdies, so to speak. I sensed the developers were being hounded by impatient folks, whereas the SL lists are much more calm about these things. On the other hand, CentOS developers keep more of their discussions in private, and don’t take time to post detailed descriptions of their progress toward each release. SL has their very public whiteboard, which is a copy of the project leader’s literal whiteboard kept in his office. There is also a nice listing of problem RPMs and how they went about getting past the build failures. Thus, perhaps it’s simply sane for the CentOS devs to avoid wasting time responding to every passing anxious user, whereas the SL folks don’t seem the face much of that.

You’ll be happy to know the ATrpm repository covers SL, as well. However, you’ll have to edit your YUM repo file once you install the ATrpm repo. Here is what I had to make mine look like:

baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/sl6-i386/atrpms/stable

This will get you all those nice tweaked codecs and packages for multimedia playback. Please note, Adobe now has it’s own YUM repo for the Flashplayer plugin. When you go to Adobe’s download page, you’ll get the option to select the YUM package. This allows updating the Flashplayer directly and automatically.

On the issue of fixing the bytecode hinting in the Freetype library, I noticed the SL repo is out of date compared to what is installed from the DVD. I had to get my SRPM directly from the RHEL respository. It still works out fine.

Overall I’m very pleased with how well it works like RHEL, but free and tweaked just a bit to make it easier to use. I heartily recommend Scientific Linux as a good clone of RHEL. The DVD required I select the minimal video driver, but it all worked nicely and I didn’t have to do anything to make suspend and hibernate work. SL has added a few more options for the touchpad to the standard GNOME mouse config dialog. This is typical of the enhancements you’ll find.