Linux support in Zeuthen is based on Scientific Linux, an effort kindly made available by FNAL with contributions from other labs.
SL is in use at virtually all HEP sites and many other labs, universities, and enterprises.
Information for Linux Users
Using the Myrinet and Infiniband compute clusters
Status of SL Releases
at the Red Hat Summit 2008, it was announced that full support for EL4 and EL5 will be extended by another year, see here, but the new dates are not yet visible on Re Hat's web pages.
Scientific Linux 5
SL5 is our current workhorse (since Summer 2007) and will be the focus of linux support for a while, most likely for all of 2008 and 2009.
New hardware can be expected to work with SL5 until Spring 2010 (2011?). Supporting existing systems is possible until April 2014.
Scientific Linux 4
SL4 is mainly used on servers, and not foreseen for general use especially on the desktop. It's already old and its successor is available. Some SL4 systems will probably have to be provided for the LHC activities, as long as this is the mainstream distribution at CERN. Add-ons will be kept to a minimum.
New hardware can be expected to work with SL4 until Spring 2008 (2009?), but there are already some problems with the latest desktop PCs.
Existing systems can be kept alive until February 2012, if required and sensible, under a model similar to the one described for SL3 below. Note that the end of life for Scientific Linux 4 is currently scheduled for October, 2010. Afterwards, we'll have to use CentOS 4 instead.
Scientific Linux 3
SL3 was our workhorse from early 2005 to Summer 2007. It still works on hardware released until about Summer 2007, with growing pains regarding sound and video. It will not work on the latest PCs (anything more recent than a Dell Precision 390).
Full upstream support ended November 2007. On December 1st, it transisitioned to "Legacy support". See this copy of the announcement.
Accordingly, desktop support in Zeuthen ended November 2007 as well, affecting:
ALSA - sound will no longer work on recent hardware (satyr & oreade class systems)
nonstandard video drivers - only a single TFT screen will work on dryade, satyr & oreade class systems
- add-on software cumbersome to maintain (in particular: firefox, thunderbird, acroread)
See this copy of the announcement sent out to group leaders and computing contacts November 21st, 2007. No negative feedback was received (Dec. 4 2007), just a single reply that this is fine.
SL3 is now essentially frozen (security updates only).
Within these limitations, we plan support for existing SL3 systems until October 2010, the end of life date of RHEL3. If SL legacy support will not be available, we still have two options: use CentOS errata, or purchase subscriptions for the (few) remaining systems.
Local Repositories and Mirrors
We mirror the current SL3, SL4, and SL5 releases: Local_Linux_Repositories
Network installations (http) are also possible from these repositories, using the small boot.iso CD images found in the images/ subdirectory of the distribution.
Full iso images are available in /project/linux/iso.