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Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-out dept.

Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."

7 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. "Enterprise Linux" by EveryNickIsTaken · · Score: 5, Funny

    At some point, one of these Enterprise editions had better have a Starfleet logo on it.

  2. CentOS 5 by Nighttime · · Score: 5, Interesting

    By looking at the release dates of CentOS 4.x and comparing them to the release dates of RHEL 4.x, it looks like we can expect to see CentOS 5 released on 28th March 2007.

    The two weeks lead time would appear to be borne out by this CentOS FAQ entry.

    --
    I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
  3. Re:R Hell by MartinG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We had an RHEL3 box which had a truly ancient version of Python installed

    Do you realise how long ago RHEL3 came out?

    You couldn't force an upgrade

    I don't think your criticisms should be aimed at RHEL. If you wanted new packages over stability or wanted to be able to force upgrade then you picked the wrong distro. You are not their target audience.

    If the stability of fedora is enough for your needs maybe you should look there instead?

    --
    -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu
  4. Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore by weeble · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You might want to consider who paid for writing the kernel.

    How much effort was put in to fixing bugs by people paid for by Red Hat.

    Software developed by Red Hat includes projects such as Network Manager, Totem etc.

    This all costs money and Red Hat funds a lot of development. I do not see Ubuntu on the following list:
    Top (kernel) lines changed by employer
    (Unknown) 740990 29.5%
    Red Hat 361539 14.4%
    (None) 239888 9.6%
    IBM 200473 8.0%
    QLogic 91834 3.7%
    Novell 91594 3.6%
    Intel 78041 3.1%
    MIPS Technologies 58857 2.3%
    Nokia 39676 1.6%
    SANPeople 36038 1.4%

    http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/

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    Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
  5. boring == good by heinlein · · Score: 5, Insightful

    RHEL (or, for me, CentOS) is boring. It's not meant to run on the latest gamer PCs or laptops. It doesn't include proprietary video drivers. All it does is serve up bits without interruption: databases, web pages, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, files, login shells. Work gets done. Customers get served. Employees get paid. All without any danger/excitement! Boring is a feature, not a bug.

  6. Re:R Hell by tobiasly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    However, it's a bit disappointing that my employers were still paying a support contract on this box but the package updates that were part of this contract were more than 3 years old.

    The point is that, even though the Python package may be 3 years old, if it's still under support, and tomorrow they found a security bug in that years-old version, you would still get a security patch for it.

    I don't think it's too much to expect a little flexibility when you're paying for it.

    That's the thing.. you're not paying for a little flexibility. You're paying for stability and maintenance. It may seem backwards to you but that's the exact sorta thing that most "enterprise" customers want. If they offered the sort of flexibility you're looking for, that would mean supporting multiple different versions of different packages within a single distro.

    The reason they can offer such long-term support is that every user of every package in that distro is running the exact same version. It would simply not be economically possible for them to offer 7 years of support on a product if they allowed people to run whatever version they wanted, even as an option.

  7. Re:When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat? by jabuzz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because Ubuntu does not have a long track record of providing five years of product support. Once you deploy a server in a production enviroment doing OS upgrades is not something to be done lightly, and if it ain't broke I am not about to try fixing it. Knowing I can depend on RedHat to keep my servers secure to the point I will be binning the hardware first is very important.