Cent OS Linux

These days I am trying my hands on Cent OS Linux. Cent OS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but is free.

 

So what’s this enterprise fuss all about. On your personal system you would want to try out the latest and greatest stuff. If the stuff doesn’t work you can remove it or if things go horribly wrong you can just reformat your system. When you are running a server used by thousands of people you don’t have such flexibility. Machine restart, which is a normal operation on personal desktops is a big deal on enterprise servers. Such operations have to be notified in advance with estimated downtime. Before you restart the system you need to take it out of the load balancer pool and when restarted, add it back. In a nutshell, you are much more likely to want things to work perfectly on your enterprise servers than you would on your personal computer.

 

So, what can you do to make sure that things don’t break suddenly or frequently on your enterprise server. One thing you can do is to stop adding new functionality and only take fixes. This is the philosophy behind Cent OS and RHEL. Once in a while(typically seven years) a major version of this enterprise OS is released. In between releases, only bug fixes are picked up for the installed software, no new features are taken. This is a very difficult thing to achieve as most software would keep adding functionality. The guys behind Cent OS do this difficult task for you and provide you easy to update patches. When I say easy to update I do mean it. Updating is as easy as running a simple command like “yum update”.

 

So if you do not want the latest and greatest changes to server software and just want to run your code in a predictable way then Cent OS is for you. It is surprisingly easy to learn but make sure you do learn it. Unlike windows where you can just find things by groping around, you do need to learn your chops on Linux. But, once you do so you will be way more productive. Working on windows is like playing Teen Do Paanch; it is easy to learn but that’s it… you don’t learn further. Working on Linux is like playing a sophisticated game such as bridge or poker which takes a while to learn but where there is a new thing to learn every day.