[clue] RHEL - Fedora vs CentOS

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2014-04-23 at 16:36 -0600, Senthil Punniya wrote:

> Would like to use Red Hat as a system for learning cloud computing.
> Is Red Hat Linux available for free/nominal price for personal and
> educational use?

CentOS is the free version of Red Hat, sans proprietary things like
branding (icons, etc.) and perhaps some custom applications (like,
maybe, JBoss?).  

Fedora is the bleeding edge version of Red Hat and is also free.  Fedora
has the latest greatest software which, while it seems optimal, may not
be for everyone.

CentOS is "stable" (see kernel.org) and has long term support, just like
Red Hat.  See http://wiki.centos.org/Download

Fedora releases are short term with a typical lifespan of about 18
months.  I tend to use a Fedora release for about 36 months, skipping
every other release (usually). 
> 
> Instead of Red Hat can I use Fedora or CentOS. 
> I wanted to use OpenStack, and Openshift... things like that...

Don't know anything about these.  In general you'll find that if they
are listed as supported by Red Hat they will probably work on CentOS.
Fedora usually works, but you may need to be creative in finding
compatible prerequisites.

Personally, I find that Fedora tells me about things coming down the
road that I may not like but don't have much choice in (systemd comes to
mind, as does make 3.82) so I have time to get ready.  CentOS is used
for products we deliver to customers at work because customers expect us
to know the software while they are simply end users.

Generally speaking, if you need to support customers or just want a
stable platform for development you go with CentOS.  If you're a hacker
and need the latest versions of tools packaged for you then go with
Fedora.  

-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>