[BlueOnyx:07556] Re: 6105R or 5016R

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Darrell,

> What version of Blue Onyx is currently in production?  My build shows
> "build 20110615 for a 5106R in en_US" but I keep seeing references to
> 6105R.

Build number can always be ignored, as all fully YUM updated boxes of the same 
model will have the same build number. 'en_US' simply means that the GUI is 
set to American English as primary language.

5106R = BlueOnyx on CentOS5
5107R = BlueOnyx on  CentOS6 and/or Scientific Linux 6 (32bit)
5108R = BlueOnyx on  CentOS6 and/or Scientific Linux 6 (64bit)

6102R = Aventurin{e} on CentOS4
6105R = Aventurin{e} on CentOS5
6106R = Aventurin{e} on CentOS6 and/or Scientific Linux 6

To avoid some confusion here regarding CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6:

As you all know, CentOS6 isn't out yet. However, there is another GPL'ed RHEL6 
clone out since 3rd March, created by FERMI labs and CERN: 

Scientific Linux 6 - http://www.scientificlinux.org

They've done their own RHEL clones for the last couple of years and one really 
needs to admit that they're doing a mightily fine job with these. The more I 
got to use it, the more I liked it. So while the guys at CentOS are still 
choking on 6.0 (they just pushed the release date further into the future 
again), SL is about to launch their 6.1 release.

In the meantime I've been using several SL 6.0 boxes to bring our 5107R code 
base further along and it is shaping up nicely. I'd say it's about 95% done. 
All things considered I could probably push a Beta ISO (based on SL6) out way 
before CentOS6 will be ready. Our 32bit release needed fewer fixes than I 
thought and I was able to cut some corners, too.

Now for all practical purposes RHEL6, CentOS6 and SL6 are are pretty much 
identical (or will be, when CentOS gets their act together!) and things 
compiled on either one run on the others, too, without any further recompile. 

So neither for users, for third party software makers or server admins it will 
make any difference if your next BlueOnyx runs on SL6 or CentOS6. For that 
reason boxes that run BlueOnyx on SL6 will have the same model number as their 
CentOS6 brothers, as there is no need to make a distinction between the two.  
The only practical difference is that CentOS ties into the CentOS YUM 
repository and SL ties into the SL YUM repository. They will both use the same 
BlueOnyx YUM repository, so there is maybe 0.001% of code that needed to be 
made plattform aware for some minimal and irrelevant distinctions. Oh, and the 
guys at SL are usually releasing patches and updates faster than CentOS, but 
that doesn't hurt either. 

So yeah, we will be supporting both CentOS6 and SL6 starting with 5107R, 
allowing for more choices and a bit more flexibility. The only downside is 
that I'll have to maintain the build of another set of ISO images.How well 
BlueOnyx on SL6 is received will decide if it's just a passing fancy that 
helps to bridge the waiting for CentOS6, or if we'll keep it around as the 
serious alternative that it certainly is.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber