My experience.

After reading this i thought it might be a good idea to test our rhel dev server with centos (Purely to save money).

First off we where solely windows and i got employeed to do some profilers for the company so my first choice was unix HP-UX or similiar. Way to exspensive! So it was settled on RHEL and fedora for some smaller things.

Centos gave me the "same" basis as RHEL ie not realy a desktop os but more focused on server thingy's at least thats according to there website.
I found that statment a bit bizarre seeing that i had to source alot of "server monitoring" software from the web.

Oracle needed alot of tweaks to get it working and with mysql i needed to change the config alot more than what i have had to do on RHEL.

Still nothing to major.

The real problems was when i transfered the c and c++ apps (I use a combination depending on what i need) All twelve apps compiled fine but after putting it throught its passes I found some realy odd results. I first thought i might have installed somehting wrong but after investigation i found that they way centos maps its memory is alot different to Fedora or RHEL and the reason why im getting different results is the system calls specific to memory being different. Its not a major because the skew is with in tolerance and if you dont map more than 2GB section files you should see no difference.


Will we be going to CentOS? Dont know RHEL gives us good support and the dev server is now free as we dont want support on it.

Is it good as a web server? Im sure it nothing worse than RHEL. Althought the security thing was a pain in the ass to sort out. Centos seems to block everything and you decide what you open. RHEL seems to block a subset and then you decided what else.
I think CentOS is more secure due to its policy.

Support on it? Im still waiting for some answers on question about the mmap.


The only thing i realy learned from this is that not all linux systems are equal but still a shit load better than any windows os