Scientific Linux is a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-developed by Fermilab National Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research.Although it aims to be fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it also provides additional packages not found on the distro that comes from. Most notable among these are various file systems, including Cluster Suite and Global File System, FUSE, OpenAFS, Squashfs, and Unionfs; wireless network support with signatures for Intel Wireless, MadWiFi and NDISwrapper, etc.
The main purpose of Scientific Linux is to produce a common Linux distribution for various laboratories and universities around the world, thus reducing duplicate effort. The main goals are to make everything compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux with only minor additions and changes, and to allow easy customization of a site, without disturbing the Linux foundation. Unlike other distributions such as Poseidon Linux, it does not contain a large collection of scientific software as its name suggests. However, it provides good compatibility for installing such software.
Unfortunately now, its developers have decided to stop and not release new versions of this operating system. The release of Scientific Linux 8 was expected, but this version will never be released, or it will not be if things do not change much, as for the most recent previous versions, both Scientific Linux 6 although unfortunately it stopped receiving updates in 2020, but Scientific Linux 7 will continue to receive support until the end of its life cycle, which coincides with the year 2024. That will be the date on which this scientific distribution will definitely die, at least as far as updates are concerned.
To give you an idea of how old an operating system is almost three decades old, say that this Red Hat-based operating system is older than Ubuntu, about 5 months older. The system developed by Canonical released its first version in October 2004, while Scientific Linux was released for the first time in May of the same year.
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