Am I right in thinking Fedora is the nearest free distro to Redhat?

If I am attempting to install software that’s supported on Redhat, am I likely to have fewer problems on Fedora than I am currently having on Ubuntu?

Yeah, they are similar products but with Red Hat being altered slightly to support the commercial world and being supported. Fedora is from the same people but a community project.

CentOS 7 is the free version of Redhat

That is my understanding. Actually I think (Free) Redhat became Fedora some time ago and Redhat became an “enterprise” product that you have to pay gazillions for.

If the thing you are trying to install is an RPM then it would definitely be easier to install on Fedora.

EDIT: Though there are lots of RPM based distros. I didn’t realise Redhat had started sponsoring CentOS, but that might be a better option for you.

It’s not an rpm, it’s script based and it keeps failing miserably on Ubuntu, spent half a day hacking it 🙂

Thanks folks.

Neither – CentOS

CentOS is EXACTLY the same as RHEL (apart from logos and such). Fedora is simply based on it. If it works on CentOS it will work on RHEL and vice versa. There are some significant differences between RHEL/CentOS and Fedora – though clearly not as significant as the difference between RHEL and Ubuntu which is Debian based.

(I worked on a product which we developed on CentOS and distributed with either RHEL or CentOS depending on the customer’s requirements, and have recent experience of porting between Fedora and CentOS).

As aracer said CentOS = RHEL but free, they are binary compatible.

Fedora is based on redhat but has much more up to date packages and code from the development branches, good in some ways, bad in others.

It depends what you’re planning to do with it, but if you’re developing or using software that is specifcally for/supported on RHEL then use CentOS, not Fedora unless you are well versed in the differences and can account for them properly.

Well, CentOS 7 is exactly what I wanted for making VMs. Nice usable professional looking desktop without loads of fluff. Managed to get it working with hardware graphics acceleration too which keeps my cpu from running hot and draining battery.

CentOS is EXACTLY the same as RHEL (apart from logos and such). Fedora is simply based on it

The other way round, surely? Fedora is the bleeding edge release, beta-tested by the community, while RedHat (RHEL) is the long term supported version.

Damn – I thought this thread was about some suave new breed of ramblers. I feel cheated now….

As a shop using Redhat this is the setup. Fedora is the “upstream” project so contains all the bleeding edge stuff etc. At intervals RedHat pick a version i.e Fedora 20 and will use that to create Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). To create it they take the fedora packages and further test them back porting fixes as they go. Once it is hardened for production use they release it. This will mean that RHEL will be “older” than the latest Fedora as stability is key rather than new stuff. Makes sense?

Now as RHEL is still open source you can download the source files etc. So where does Centos fit? The Centos Team take the RHEL source files and rebuild them but strip out the branding and replace it with the Centos branding. This gives you access to stable version of RHEL but without the cost for support.

So if brief:

Fedora -> RHEL -> Centos

Spoke too soon. Updates just foobarred it.

If want an OS to just work then use Debian which is the basis of Ubuntu. The difference is that Debian is built around stability rather than shiny stuff like Ubuntu.

If want an OS to just work then use Debian which is the basis of Ubuntu.

Did you read the OP? 🙄

I have to admit I wasn’t aware of the development path between RHEL and Fedora, but my comments about the differences and CentOS being identical stand – there are definitely differences between Fedora and RHEL/CentOS which can’t just be accounted for by the position in the release cycle. It seems RHEL is branched from Fedora rather than just being a copy of it. I’d certainly still pick CentOS over Fedora for use on a server.

The other way round, surely?

Yes, current situation better explain by Stupid.is above, I was referring to how it originally came about when Fedora was to be the community release replacement for RH when it was discontinued and became RHEL, before CentOS came on the scene.

Advice stands though, if you want a free enterprise/stable alternative to RHEL, CentOS is the better option. Fedora if you are happy to sit on the development tree, swings and roundabouts, new features available but at the cost of potential stability or compatibility problems.

Debian

Hmmph, not in my good books at the moment, from bitter experience this week getting LTS for Debian versions older than 1 version back is a lot harder than RHEL/CentOS. Far too much manaul patching and rebuilding from source for my liking on an OS that was released in 2009 and expected to be used in production and enterprise environments.

Not a problem if you’re likely to be able to upgrade when needed but worth factoring it into any plans for production services that may end up with a long shelf life. Debian will force you down a regular upgrade cycle (not necessarily a bad thing!).

Spoke too soon. Updates just foobarred it.

what’s happened?
It’s very unusual for updates to break a RHEL/CentOS system unless you’ve enabled some third party repos or rebuilt something from source and now got it in a tiz.

what’s happened?

Long story (aren’t they always?) short – I’m using this as a VM, and I wanted to enable hardware acceleration as even with classic Gnome the desktop was causing higher CPU usage on the host than I wanted. VMWare refused to allow it, so I followed these instructions to enable it. That still didn’t work, then I used the ignore blacklist option in VMWare and it worked.

Thinking about it, I had to compile that shit so that’s probably what’s wrong. It does say that stuff is in most distros now so perhaps I could re-install from scratch and then try the vmware option first.

I’m using this as a VM, and I wanted to enable hardware acceleration as even with classic Gnome the desktop was causing higher CPU usage on the host than I wanted

Hmm, well in that case it might actually be worth trying Fedora. I tend not to use CentOS in VMs so much – the Fedora one I’m currently using has LXDE which seems to be a lot lighter than Gnome (or you could put LXDE on Centos though I’ve not tried that). It may also be the case that Fedora comes with the driver stuff which CentOS doesn’t.

I don’t lke LXDE though… I’ll try starting from scratch.

what were the updates?

VMware? or kernel?

I always stopped ubuntu from doing kernel updates when I ran virtualbox, since there would invariably be a week or so between them sending out a critical kernel vuln fix, and the virtualbox package being fixed with the right kernel modules.

134 updates for the guest, I didn’t read through them all 🙂 But whilst it appears to be the same kernel I’ve got another grub entry with the same text but with (core) appended to it.

I should probably not connect my VMs to the internet at all – the only reason they are is that I often need to browse whilst working, and eclipse run in unity mode would eventually crash. Although that was with a Windows guest, must try again with linux.

Reinstalled OS with the vmware option enabled and hardware acceleration works straight away. VMWare Tools doesn’t compile its additions though, I had to hack the source code!