practicing techie

Linux application software developers often face a choice between two compatible but different OS variants: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. Using RHEL can sometimes be problematic for developers because typically some sort of centralized subscription management is required for enabling software updates, and depending on the organization you can get stuck from hours to days. The required bureaucracy can be a really frustrating experience for software developers looking to install just a basic virtualized RHEL guest OS instance for development or QA purposes: 5 minutes and you’re done – if it just wasn’t for the subscription management part! CentOS on the other hand can be freely downloaded and used but the downside is that traditionally publishing updates has dragged behind. Depending on the project, this may not be a big problem for QA and development purposes, but for internet facing production platforms you’d like the security updates to get installed as soon as they get released.

Oracle Enterprise Linux is an enterprise Linux distribution similar to CentOS in that it’s binary compatible with RHEL. It’s also been made freely (as in beer) available recently. The big upside for the app dev use case above is that Oracle promises to publish updates faster than CentOS has done. For operations personnel the benefit is that you can also get paid support for the OS from Oracle as well as some interesting features, such as zero-downtime kernel updates with Ksplice.

Being a bit curious, I downloaded Oracle Linux installation image (Oracle Linux Release 6 Update 3 for x86_64 [64 Bit], 3.5 GB) from Oracle and installed it as a virtualized guest OS instance on my laptop. The installation process worked as expected with RHEL and CentOS, except for the different branding, logos etc., of course. Software updates also installed without problems after initial installation.

So far I’ve dismissed Oracle Linux from consideration as a niche distribution and had some doubts about its continuity, but it does look like a solid OS and it has been around for a while now, so it could be a viable option to consider when choosing an enterprise Linux platform.

For more information see:

• Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS
• Oracle Linux Technical information (incl. Oracle value-added features)
• LWN.net article on Oracle Linux