ScientificLinux (SL) Its original purpose was to reduce duplication amonglaboratories and have a total installed base for the various experimentsand other research projects.
The base SL distribution is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source.
Themain purpose of the base distribution to provide full binarycompatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a few to make minoradditions or changes. Examples of such additions are Pine, and OpenAFS.
ScientificLinux uses yum to download and install updates from the repository,such as Fedora, unlike Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which receives updatesfrom the servers, Red Hat Network
