Scientific Linux 5.6 Released

Scientific Linux 5.6

The developers of Scientific Linux (SL) have released version 5.6 of their Linux distribution. As with the project's previous versions, this one is a free remodeling of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the same version number – SL 5.6 therefore also includes all of the improvements that Red Hat added to RHEL 5.6.

In the release email, the developers emphasise the Atom Shine graphical theme as being one of the main innovations, followed by a list of packages that the SL developers have included which are not in RHEL 5.6. Versions of SL prior to 6.0 contain a lot of such packages; in SL 6.0, the developers added only a few additional packages, referring users instead to repositories such as ATrpms, EPEL and RPMforge for additional software.

The SL developers certainly took their time – Oracle and CentOS produced their remodeled versions of RHEL 5.6, which was released in January, months ago; RHEL 5.7 will probably be published in just a few weeks. In contrast, the SL developers were much faster with version 6.0, with an alpha of version 6.1already released. The CentOS project is still working on version 6.0, which, according to the unofficial project calendar, is about to be finalised and released.

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