RHEL-based Scientific Linux 4.9 arrives

The Scientific Linux development team has announced the release of version 4.9 of its Linux distribution. According to the developers, the legacy 4.x branch release is "a nice stable release" as it contains nearly two years of security and bug fixes, but no new features or packages.

Primarily driven by Fermilab, CERN and other universities and research institutes, the project provides a free clone of the subscription only Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). To make it available for free, protected components (such as Red Hat trademarks) were removed from RHEL's freely accessible sources; in addition, the software was recompiled for installation media to ensure that Scientific Linux retains all of the well-known functions included in the 4.x branch of RHEL.

RHEL 4.9, sometimes referred to as RHEL 4 Update 9, was released in mid-February of this year. As the RHEL 4.x is currently in the second phase of the RHEL life cycle, this update contained few new features and instead focused on addressing bugs and security-related problems. Two weeks after RHEL 4.9 was released, the CentOS developers published version 4.9 of their RHEL clone.

Further details, including a list of changes and limitations, can be found in the release notes. Scientific Linux 4.9 is available to download from one of the project's mirrors. The project released version 6.0, the latest major release, in early March of this year.

See also:

• RHEL-based Scientific Linux 6.0 released, a report from The H.

(crve)