White box Linux also known as White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) started as an effort to overcome the functionality gap between Redhat’s RHEL and Fedora Core. A public library was facing a difficulty of moving all its servers on RHEL and also had to pay heavily for the licensing fees. This gave the birth to WBEL.
The intention behind WBEL’s development is to create a RPM-based Linux distribution which is compatible with RHEL and to allow upgrades to happen easily. The project also attempts to retain compatibility with their Redhat’s errata srpms.
Because WBEL is a derivative of Redhat’s enterprise Linux product, WBEL is not targeted at home use. All the Red Hat brandings were replaced by WBEL, however the product is otherwise the same as RHEL. The software installation of White box is somewhat similar to that of Anaconda based distributions. It takes around 21 minutes to install WBEL.
The up2date agent used by RHEL has been modified by White Box to use Fedora’s yum. Whitebox is up to date with OpenSSL and Samba. Up2date is the main focus of the project, for people looking to upgrade for their versions of Red Hat to a free version.
