LinuxStories: CentOS 7: The perfect gift for the Linux do-it-yourselfer

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 Although differentiation is tough in Linux distributions today, CentOS 7 has carved out a niche as the free and open alter ego to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We found that CentOS, which is mandated to be binary-compatible with Red Hat 7, shares about 95% of the features of its commercial enterprise-class sibling.  

          

There’s no IBM System z port, and special variants for cloud and virtualization are more limited than with Red Hat 7. But for many common and generic applications, it’s a drop-in replacement.

 

The primary differences for most IT admins, systems people, and engineers/developers will be a (purchased) relationship with Red Hat and Red Hat’s army of supported applications, working partnership projects and management skills.

 

CentOS 7 is perhaps most aptly put as the DIY twin of RHEL7—who lives in the distro ghetto across the railroad tracks.

 

Still, in testing different deployment payloads, and also where we chose GUIs, the look and feel between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 7 instances were essentially the same. And the same mistakes made to either usually cause the same explosions.

 

You might or might not find the fix faster in a Red Hat resource. The Centos.org website doesn't have Red Hat’s polish, and has many odd links to nowhere or nothing—not 404s, rather, unfinished projects. The CentOS site seemed comparatively untended to us.

 

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