Scientific Linux

Scientific Linux 6.0 is currently installed on the computers in MH263. The reasons for this are twofold. First, the uEye camera software will only run on one of the RedHat distributions or some variant. Therefore, we installed Scientific Linux 6.0, based off of the RHEL6 core.

Differences between SL and Ubuntu

For installing packages in Ubuntu, one uses apt-get and the Synaptic package manager. SL uses yum and Yum Extender. Yum Extender, however, is not installed by default and is not as clean as Synaptic. See below for how to install Yumex.

Packages are handled roughly the same, but the repositories are much different. There are many repositories enabled by default in Ubuntu, but SL only has two repositories enabled at installation. They are the "official" repositories, which means that to install anything special, you need EPEL, which extends RHEL6.

Installing Yumex

Yumex requires the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository. Installing this, however, requires one of two things. One can either import the required key or force rpm to ignore the key required. Download the file named epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm, and in a terminal, run

rpm --nogpgcheck epel-release-6-6.noarch.rpm