Hi,

Plz ezcuse me if this is a dumb question but,

i have got SUSe on my VM Ware player and i am preparing for my RHCE exam.
i could not find redhat for VM Ware

can i practise on SUSe to train for my RHCE exam, i mean are the commands and the files same as redhat.

please help me.

thank you very much.

Practice with CentOS (same major version as RHEL).

Its true that there are a lot of similarities between different Linux distros and both SUSE and RHEL are based on .rpm systems however SUSE has its own control center application called yast. RHEL will have something similar but not identically. If you want to use any graphical config utils then this might cause a problem.

If you stay on the command line you should notice very little difference although the config files will look different as they have been created by different apps. If your going to use the command line to work with I would suggest a "purer" Linux distro such as Slackware.

alternativly try and find Fedora 7. This is the latest version of redhat's community release and contains many of the same technology's as the latest RHEL including SELinux which could also be useful

Im afraid it comes to the old adage if you want to learn Red hat use red hat if you want to learn suse use suse if you want to learn linux use slack.


(Ive purposefully missed out the .deb family of distros (Debian Gnu/Linux, Ubuntu etc.. because they are probably the least useful to you in this situation - not that there bad)

Actually RedHats (by that I mean "Fedoras" and "RHELs" and such newer RedHat-thing operating systems) don't have that kind of a control center than SuSE has, if I'm not mistaken. RedHats used to, and probably still do, have several graphical configuration tools/utilies for different purposes. Gnome introduced this "Control center", but it's mainly just a directory containing links to the various tools or something like that..and it's not RedHat-specific either. So when it comes to configuring something, their (possible) equalities only stat from command-line usage, and not necessarily even there; RH and SuSE do differ from each other, even if it's not much.

I agree that you should try to find a new Fedora version, because they're almost identical to the commercial RedHat operating systems. WhiteBox Linux, if I'm right, equals to the commercial RHs too, maybe in the same sense as CentOS (though I've never used it, so this is just something I've heard).

If you want to know specifically RedHat-things, you need to learn and practise them on RedHat. General Linux/UNIX administration can be learned in almost any such operating systems, but the little differences between the flavours need to be learned in "their own playground".

for the exam you'll need to know RH specifically, so get RHEL or Centos (free version of RHEL).

Well, a lot of them are the same, but some aren't. So, you can practise on SuSE, but you shouldn't, because you won't know which commands are good for your RedHat exam and which aren't.

RedHat (and derivatives and close relations, such as Fedora, Centos, StartComm, WhiteBox...) and slightly less related ditros such as SuSE all use the rpm package management system, which is a good start, but SuSE uses its own centralised management tool, YAST to manage installation and removal. So anything you learn using YAST will be wrong for a RedHat exam.

SuSE also uses a variant of the startup scripts (again giving you the option to manage in Yast). So, you'll learn the wrong stuff here.

These are both big items and I'm sure there are other details (the automounter comes to mind as a possible one as SuSE has messed around with automounter setup over the last few releases, as does the updater, but these come down to which version of SuSE you have).

Of course, you could try knowing where there are differences and steering clear of those questions, but as there are some big sections involved (plus probably a number of interesting details) that doesn't look like a wise plan at all.

you can of course install fedora in a virtual machine if you don't feel like switching or dual-booting. I suggest you use virtualbox, but you can also get vmware-server, which is free. But you have to register and there is no rpm installer.

CentOS is built from the RHEL source so it's the closest you are going to come to RHEL without actually running RHEL.