New Red Hat Linux Beta: Severn

JofCoRe writes "Just got a message from the redhat watch list today, announcing the availability of a new beta, called "Severn". Some snippets from the announcement: What's its development status? "It doesn't seem too horrendously in flux. Difficult at this moment to make a specific diagnosis." Among other things, SEVERN has: a new graphical boot, GCC 3.3, an updated 2.4.21 kernel, updated Evolution and Mozilla, More information about the beta can be found at rhl.redhat.com. And the Release notes are found here. Looks like they have it currently labeled as v9.0.93." Update: 07/21 15:11 GMT by H : It's 3.2.3 GCC, not 3.3, as I had above.

Comments

Free continues

[digitect]

Maybe it's just the pressure for profitability, but I continue to be blown away at RedHat's committment to Free Software and community commitment. These guys have a huge share of the GNU/Linux commercial market and yet they continue to be as open as is possible for a for-profit company.

They have invested a ton of effort into software now distributed by most other distributions (GNOME, RPM, kernel development, graphics, etc.). I don't mean that there aren't others playing, too. But it seems every time I expect RedHat to start trying to greedily hawk their enviable position, they do just the opposite.

Thanks RedHat!

Re:No Galeon?

[chabotc]

I think you put your finger right on the problem.. For people who are not intimidated it's 'cool' but for many others not understanding it is confusing and/or intimidating; They don't understand computers and prob. don't want to..

The graphical representation of the bootup info makes the user 'understand' more and makes it less intimidating.. Much like a GUI makes a computer easier to use then text mode programs ;-)

Re:Version numbering

[HiThere]

Yes. A new kernel version is a definite good reason for a whole version increment. But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign. True, they were probably expecting the new kernel to be ready for 10, or, I rather hope, 10.0, but it seems like a statement of "We won't have any intermediate bug fix releases", and that bothers me.

OTOH, a lot is going to depend on what their new release style is. Assuming that everyone has a broadband connection and doesn't pay for bits downloaded is... optomistic at best. Perhaps they aren't interested in anyone else as a customer (if you can't pay for a broadband connection, you're unlikely to buy an Enterprise Edition), but they might consider that developers are also an important market for them. Not so much as a source of cash, but as a source of skills that make their product useful to enterprises. And many of them *don't* have broadband connections.

Well, there's Mandrake and CheapBytes, but Mandrake is diverging more and more from the Red Hat model (nothing deep, but the tools are different, some of the directories are different, etc.) OK. There's CheapBytes. But CheapBytes (etc.) has no particular brand loyalty to Red Hat. They will sell you whatever the hot distro is. And Red Hat has explicitly told them "Don't use our name." That's fair, but it cuts down on the advertising exposure.

Altogether, I think that they still need to make boxed sets. And that if they don't then they'll regret it. But this isn't the same thing as paying stores to carry it on their shelves. That's probably something of dubious value. Perhaps they should set up a JIT manual printing, disk burning and boxing shop. And only make as many as they have orders for. They'll need to ensure that what comes out is good quality, but there wouldn't be any excess (or not much). There's a company that was trying to get a JIT book printer into bookstores (distribution of the right to copy was a problem), so they might be glad for a sale. And CD burners aren't that hard to come by, especially if your forcast is that you won't need thousands of copies.