Scientific Linux

With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I've had to renew my certification. A couple Friday's ago, I got my RHCSA, and in a couple more weeks I do the RHCE. In preparing for the test, I've come across a distribution called Scientific Linux

Scientific Linux is a recompiled version of RHEL, similar in concept to CentOS, with one very important difference: CentOS sucks and is for posers. Scientific Linux, or SL, however, is the output of Fermilab and CERN. Where as CentOS is a disorganized, bickering bunch of dot.com wannabee's, who have created a product for people that are too cheap to run Red Hat, but too scared to run Fedora, SL is put together by people who need raw computing horsepower, and lots of it.

I've played with it, and thus far, am impressed with what they've done. Here are some observations:
* I was a little surprised when I used the boot.iso to launch a installed only to find that it automatically does a minimal install without asking.
* It defaults to postfix instead of sendmail, but I guess its about time to let sendmail die.
* At install time, you can select several well respected third party repos.
* They've got a lean, mean, minimal install.
* The GUI installer would not run in 640Mb of RAM, but would at 768Mb. (But that might be a RH thing.) Once it was installed, I dropped the memory down to 256Mb and everything run spiffily.
* They've got the install DVD's laid out wrong-- You can't do a base install using only DVD1. For me, that meant I had to actually extract the DVD's to create an intall repo rather than mount just DVD1.

I'm running this in a VM under Citrix XenServer and am having some problems with the vmtools utility, but that does not surprise me. Once I've got the base VM tweaked, my first project will be an OpenLDAP server, followed by a Kerberos.