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Red Hat EL 4.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the hey-no-fair-lookin' dept.

diegocgteleline.es writes "As it has been noticed by some news sites, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 has been released. RedHat's web site doesn't seem to have any reference, but with Red Hat being probably the most used distro in the enterprise and featuring for first time a 2.6 kernel, this is a major milestone for linux in the server arena. There're already some reviews."

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Compared to . . .? by wakejagr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From the article:

    Conservative release cycles and a more exhaustive test cycle make Red Hat Enterprise Linux a safer bet for the business community--they don't have to chase the release of the week.

    I guess they aren't comparing release cycles with Debian . . . maybe Longhorn?

    All joking aside, I think RHEL isn't so much competing with other Linux distro's as with Windows. RedHat is trying to offer a choice to companies that are considering the jump away from MS: AS and ES for server machines and WS for workstations, solid support. I haven't used RH in a while, but I hear RPM hell isn't the "killer" app it used to be. Sounds like it's good competition for Windows.

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    Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
    1. Re:Compared to . . .? by hdparm · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Well, it has ousted Sun from pretty much all of the big financial organisations and is making inroads elsewhere but not necessarily 'attacking' Windows. It will be long and hard battle in all places that have Windows AD installed - there still isn't open-source replacement for it out there. Hopefully, samba 4 will give us leverage on that end as well.

      I personally can't make much sense in using commercial distros for replacing Windows in a small / medium enterprise market - much easier to sell is free (as in beer) OS. Plus, FC3 does the job well on a server and on a client side - it's been rock solid for my needs (file, print, squid, email mostly).

  2. Re:The Relevancy of RedHat by wakejagr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To the average linux user: not very.

    To non computer geeks, who only hear about linux through mass media: almost as relevant as back in the day.

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    Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
  3. Re:The Relevancy of RedHat by Leghkster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With much (most?) commercial database, email, etc. server software supported only on RHEL in the past, it's the familiar comortable choice for businesses that have already jumped. Remember the "E" in RHEL. More often, recently, I see Suse officially supported, but that's often a harder sell to the bosses. They've heard of Red Hat by now. How do you pronounce that Suse thing? ;-)

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    Witty signature omitted for brevity.
  4. Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... by LizardKing · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org? If an application is screwing things over, logical step is to drop it.

    RedHat does the kind of stress testing using common usage patterns and edge cases, and on a scale that loosely organised volunteers currently don't. I'm not saying that Debian (for example) couldn't come up with a project that does this kind of thing, but this is the area that RHEL appeals to (non-pointy haired) bosses.

    The conservative release cycles of RHEL are because the users can't afford the downtime required by the frequency of Fedora upgrades (and Gentoo is a non-starter for enterprise users unless you're a masochist who likes getting ragged on by your boss when the system crawls during an emerge).

    Well that's f*cked off the Debian and Gentoo amateurs ...