White Box Enterprise Linux 3.0 is now available for immediate download via BitTorrent or ftp. Having gone through two widely downloaded Release Candidates with only minor problems detected, White Box is ready for prime time.

Q: What is White Box Enterprise Linux?

A: Take the freely available SRPMS for Red Hat's RHEL3, strip out the trademarks required by the license and some other obvious references, go through a few compile/test cycles and you get White Box. In other words:

Same Penguin, only delivered in a plain White Box!

Q: So is it really the same?

A: Well more like 99%. RHEL3 depends on RHN for errata and of course that doesn't work without the genuine RHEL3 and a support contract. So yum and up2date were imported from Fedora and modified a bit so that yum becomes the primary method of package distribution. Of the 669 original source packages in RHEL3, 21 are modified to some degree, 1 replaced and 1 added.

Q: Should I consider White Box Enterprise Linux?

A: If you are running Red Hat Linux 7.3, 8.0 or 9.0, watching the end of life deadline approach and still wondering what you should do, White Box might be for you. Red Hat is offering you a choice between an ever churning series of .0 developer quality releases from Fedora or returning to the days of per seat licenses and audits but with a support contract. Both have their audience, but left a wide group in the middle out in the cold. Now White Box offers you the third choice they discontinued: a stable release with a long errata window, but with zero formal support.