scientific linux vs. fedora core
 

hi everybody,

recently I was told about this Scientific Linux thing, and I was wondering whether I should use this instead of Fedore Core.
What are the differences in terms of perfomance, stability, secutity, reliability, etc.?
I am installing Linux on standard Dell-issue PC's to run a very computation-intensive image processing software (it takes up to 10 hours to do a single job).
So any of your suggestions or considerations are welcome. Thank you.

best, Renat.

ScientificLinux is a Knoppix based Linux fully loaded with computational software which I have used any of them yet. Knoppix is Debian based and the V4.0.2 is about 5Gb large after install. ScientificLinux at 7.57Gb is the biggest installe distro I have in the box, as the average of the 97 distro is only 2.24Gb. You can interpret the difference in sizes as the "scientific" part over and above Knoppix.

I haven't relied on Fedora much and couldn't tell you its performance even though I have FC2, FC3, FC4 and FC5 installed. For heavy computing I tend to stick with Suse and possible Mandriva.

What I would suggest to you is to try out a few distros as they only need between 5 to 10 Gb each for residence. If you can boot 2 the same technique can allow you to boot 100.

When I started to use "dd" command to clone a 200Gb disk an old version of Knoppix Live CD took 36 hours but Suse 9.1 pro. in the hard disk only took 2.5 hours.

My take on SL is that it was just a way to get Fermilab and CERN to standardize their platform. By the way saikee, this is the SL I'm looking at, from your description you may be looking at something else. Or am I wrong? The reason I'm asking is that the one I'm looking at seems to be RHEL based, not Knoppix, and the state that they don't include any scientific software.

At any rate, I think the deciding factor here ought to be your needs. Personally, I don't see anything in SL that makes it a real standout from other distros. And I don't know if there is enough of a performance issue from distro to distro to help much. My experience is that performance is more dependant on the tweaking of the install than the actual distro.

Hangdog42,

You are correct. I mixed up SL with "Quantian0.7.9.1".

It is embarrassing because I run over 100 systems in the box and had some difficulties to persuade some distros to installed and booted beyond the 137Gb barrier, so I have been quoting my information based on the wrong distro after I swapped SL position with with Quantian.

The Quantian is the big distro that is loaded with scientic software and has an installed footprint over 7Gb. The SL 4.0 is indeed Red Hat based and is only 3.26Gb large in my hda59.

100 systems? Man, my hat is off to you......

Thanks for the mention of Quantian, I hadn't heard of it before. When my former company dumped AIX for Linux they went with RHEL and then installed a lot of what Quantian has.

Got Quantian from here

I did a writeup on booting the 100+ systems in this thread