14 DAY TRIAL // On April 17, 2017, Fermilab's Pat Riehecky was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of Scientific Linux 6.9 operating system.
Scientific Linux is an open-source GNU/Linux distribution derived from the freely distributed sources of Red Hat's RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) operating system, put together by Fermilab, CERN, and several other scientific laboratories and universities from around the world.
Scientific Linux 6.9 is the latest stable update to the 6.x series, but also the last, as Red Hat recently announced that they wouldn't support their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x branch anymore with security patches and software updates, meaning that both Scientific Linux 6.9 and RHEL 6.9 are the last in their series.
There aren't any major differences from the Scientific Linux 6.8 update, which arrived about nine months ago, on July 7, 2016. A new Scientific Linux End User License Agreement (EULA) is available containing information about the U.S. Government contract under which Fermilab produces Scientific Linux.
Move to the Scientific Linux 7.x series as soon as possible
According to the release notes, a bunch of packages were changed or removed compared with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 due to the obvious trademark reasons, and among the added packages, we can mention IceWM, OpenAFS, revisor, livecd-tools, liveusb-creator, yum-autoupdate, alpine, abattis-cantarell-fonts, and glusterfs-server.
You can download the Scientific Linux 6.9 installation images and Live CDs for either 32-bit (i686) or 64-bit (x86_64) hardware architectures right now from our website if you want to install the operating system, but existing users are recommended to run the "yum clean expire-cache" command and update their installations. We also suggest that you move to the Scientific Linux 7.x series as soon as possible.