I was going to install Scientific Linux to mess around with, and I had a few questions first.

1. Can I expect any rpm package configured specifically for RHEL or Fedora to install and run in SL exactly as it would run in Fedora/RHEL?

2. Can I add Fedora or RHEL repos to SL's yum without issue?

3. is SL's repo kept current but stable? By this I mean updating to the latest stable releases of things as soon as they come out but not any dev/testing versions

Thanks for any answers!

btw, if it matters I'm a Slackware user, not a brand-new Linux convert.

Scientific Linux SL 6.

1. Packages are identical to RHEL EL6 packages. No need for any RHEL repos.

2. 5000 Fedora packages exist as "EPEL" versions for EL6
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
2a. Some very few Fedora 12 packages can be used in SL 6.

3. Versions will generally never change. Updates are security fixes only.
( A handful of exceptions will appear over the years.)

.

I found you do need to be a little careful with third party repos. The package manager has a couple packages that enable epel and RPM forge etc, and I ran into dependency conflicts pretty darn quickly if I had to enable more than one.

It's probably just my inexperience showing, though.

For extra packages, stick to RPMfusion and EPEL. To avoid any collisions, install yum-priorities and in each repo file, set priority=1 for SL, 2 for RPMfusion, and 3 for EPEL.

The documentation at the CentOS website is useful here: it should all apply to SL.