Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has a new release out for Enterprise Linux, reports Ars Technica. Along with several anticipated new features, Enterprise Linux 5 marks the rollout of the RedHat Exchange (RHX), which will be a source for commercial third-party software applications. 'RHX will allow consumers to buy software support services for third-party open-source technologies like MySQL database software and SugarCRM customer management systems directly from Red Hat ... Linux vendor Novell, which recently partnered with Microsoft to provide stronger Windows interoperability, is already carving out a growing portion of the enterprise Linux market. Red Hat also has to contend with proprietary database vendor Oracle, who now offers commercial Linux support for Red Hat users.'"

Comments

wow

[mastershake_phd]

A new release already, seems like just yesterday they released one.

Re:wow

[rm69990]

Ummm...I think he was referring to the fact that this is the second announcement on Slashdot for this release...As in, a dupe...

Enterprise Operating Systems

[Professor_UNIX]

Let me be the first to say I'm very very very excited about this milestone and look forward to the first stable release of CentOS version 5.0 so us cheapskates can enjoy it as well.

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[Professor_UNIX]

Son of a bitch. Not only was this a dupe, but my snarky comment about being the first to mention CentOS was a dupe from the other thread as well. pwn3d.

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[krbvroc1]

Personally, I run Centos at home and on a server for a non-profit hobby. However, for work, I purchase the license and support RH. They have pretty much priced themselves out of reach for the non-corporate user. Prior to the Fedora project, I always ran Redhat on everything. The fact that Centos can provide the builds they do is a testament to OSS movement.

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[shmlco]

The basic version of RHEL is $349. I assume that's for as many servers as you want to put it on, so how is that priced "out of reach for the non-corporate user"?

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[CronScript]

$349 covers RHEL for a single, dual socket machine, 30 days of phone support and one year of updates. Support and updates for subsequent years are an additional $349 per year. It is $349 for EACH machine.

Here are more of Red Hat's terms:

5 Reporting and Inspection

5.1 Reporting. Client will promptly notify Red Hat if the number of Installed Systems exceeds the number of Installed Systems for which Client has paid the applicable fee. In its notice, Client will include both the number of additional Installed Systems and the date(s) on which such Installed Systems were put into use. Red Hat will invoice Client for the applicable Services for such Installed Systems on a pro-rata basis and Client will pay for such Services in accordance with this Agreement.

5.2 Inspection. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Red Hat or its designated agent may inspect and review Client's facilities and records in order to verify Client's compliance with this Agreement. Any such inspection and review will take place only during Client's normal business hours and upon no less than ten (10) days prior written notice from Red Hat. Red Hat will give Client written notice of any non-compliance, including the number of underreported Installed Systems, and Client will have fifteen (15) days from the date of such notice to make payment to Red Hat for the applicable Services provided to the underreported Installed Systems. If Client had underreported the number of Installed Systems by more than five percent (5%), Client will also pay Red Hat for the cost of such inspection.

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[negative3]

I'm pretty sure that the pricing for RHEL only allows updates and support for installation on a single PC or server if you buy one copy. If you install your purchased copy on numerous machines, you may violate the support agreement.

Of course, I freely admit that I may be wrong. Red Hat's website explains it all, I leave the legal deciphering to you. I just use Fedora instead - I can get the same server packages (I especially like RH's BIND config utility, system-config-bind) without the worry. I think I may check out CentOS 5 whenever they release it (about 2 weeks from what I understand).

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[canUbeleiveIT]

I take great delight in every installation of Centos that I do.

The last time I purchased RH (three years ago), I called within the 30 days to get some help with printing on an HP LaserJet. A very impatient woman who spoke very poor English gave me some extremely lousy support. Failing to resolve my problem, she dismissively told me that "printing in Linux doesn't work with all printers." Subsequently, I found the fix with a Google search.

Re:Enterprise Operating Systems

[killjoe]

Isn't that pretty much in line with windows support? In fact it probably costs less then windows 2003 server and support by a wide margin.

Can we get RHEL 5 on Dell Linux laptops?

[WillAffleckUW]

I'm looking at a nice quad-core AMD laptop that can run RHEL 5 - and if Dell sells it, it's good for me.

Or is this only for traditional "desktops"?

Also, will this run on a PS3?

Re:Can we get RHEL 5 on Dell Linux laptops?

[WillAffleckUW]

While that's nice, the article is about RHEL 5, and not everyone wants to buy from Madtux.

Most of our lab computers (Linux) are from PogoLinux and Gateway.

Could be the next step...

[kosmosik]

I can imagine most posters will say "dupe" cause this relates to RHEL5 release. But the real news is this RHX thingie.

I think it is a good idea but it should be vendor neutral. How about something like SourceForge but focused on providing a platform for comercial support and stuff like this (stuff that organizations with money *will* to pay for).

I'm so bored

[HomelessInLaJolla]

I have plenty of free time today to finally try RedHat. Please contact me to negotiate an appropriate laptop.

No waves in the pool.

[TihSon]

Whatever the technology crowd might think of Red Hat's new toys, the markets sure don't seem to care. Their last five days show a large amount of "who cares" on Wall St.

Between the big 'O' and it's 'unbreakable' RH distro, and the advent of Nicrosoft, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of watching and waiting.

Re:No waves in the pool.

[lawaetf1]

Because the market is such a reliable judge of what makes a good technology. Every time the market beats up on RHT (which it loves to do) I buy and I've yet to go wrong with that strategy (granted I will only use this approach so long as I retain faith in the company). Consider the pummeling it got when Oracle announced Unbreakable. Anyone with a clue laughed at Oracle's move but the market reacted by pounding the stock.

So Novell has allied themselves with Microsoft which is questionable at best. From all what I've read the whole bit about cross indemnification was a last-minute "oh yeah, we'll also need you to sign this" from Microsoft. To which they replied, "yes, boss" while staring hungrily at the $240 million check.

Face it, Redhat *is* enterprise linux in the US. It got #2 in CIO magazine in terms of customer satisfaction and that's saying a whole hell of a lot (Novell came in at 23). As far as the Oracle Linux bit, I can't find the article but there was a recent piece about how nobody is adopting the rip-off OS. Even the enterprise clients that Oracle listed replied when contacted that they were either NOT using it or were doing a small pilot project. And who knows how many free licenses of 10g oracle had to give out to get even that much traction.

Re:No waves in the pool.

[tobiasly]

Whatever the technology crowd might think of Red Hat's new toys, the markets sure don't seem to care. Their last five days show a large amount of "who cares" on Wall St.

That's because this isn't news. Everyone has known for quite a while that RHEL5 would be released in this timeframe. Wall Street is controlled by big money, and big money doesn't wait until they read something in the newspaper before they act on it. They are continually in contact with the companies in their portfolio and they know what direction the company is headed in long before the general public does. This "news" was already built into the price of the stock.

Re:No waves in the pool.

[rayvd]

Well said. Coming from more of a corporate environment, I was genuinely surprised (OK, I really shouldn't have been) to read some of the comments here poking fun at Red Hat as irrelevant. In the business world, the de facto standard is still RHEL, and likely is going to continue that way. RH has been around long enough that even the suits are willing to trust its name (and to a lesser extent, SuSE)... RH is far from irrelevant, and are still the #1 private company contributing to the Linux kernel.

Re:No waves in the pool.

[crsm]

Wall Street doesn't care about about a new release that have been planned for a long time. You can compare it to the reaction to Oracle's surprice announcement of their RedHat rip-off in october. RedHat suffered a 25% loss in a few days, but recovered in two months anyway.

If you wan't to see what Wall Street thinks about RedHats business strategy in general, you should take a look at the longer trends instead.

Wall Street certainly do care about RedHat

Red Hat 3rd party packages

[that this is not und]

I once bought ApplixWare in a Red Hat branded package.

Are they still supporting that? Will they still support what they're selling now as long into the future as this ApplixWare package they branded and resold?

I also once bought a branded copy of Caldera Wabi. Uh, never mind...

The good old days of looking HARD to find branded retail software for Linux.... Probably collectors items on eBay before long.

Re:Red Hat 3rd party packages

[dbIII]

It's not that sort of stuff - it's things like complex and expensive geophysical packages from companies like Halliburton where you can only get support if it's installed on a certified platform. When you have a known problems list that stretches to fifty pages and you will find a few unknown ones before the next patch (now on a yearly patch schedule!) you need support. Ironicly the licencing software (flexlm - a version about 8 years old now that uses the abandoned linuxthreads implementain from back then) provides the most grief - with stuff like this they shouldn't bother with copy protection and just sell support, the crappy Macromedia stuff makes their own product look bad by stopping it from working.

big freakin woop, their support still sucks

[kevinappel]

If RH ever gets its act together as far as support goes, maybe it will be able to start getting back some of the market share that Novell has taken. That is one thing that Novell has a serious advantage over, their support is amazing

Re:big freakin woop, their support still sucks

[eztiger]

I've had to contact them twice recently, both regarding fairly 'tricky' subjects in my opionion. SAN Multipathing and how that interacts with raw devices, lvm and Oracle. All to do with SAN problems in a RAC environment.

Both people I spoke to were exceptionally helpful.

In fact, the whole thing was great :

- I was put straight through after going through their automated call menu.
- Limited amount of 'can I take your details', just my entitlement number required.
- I'm in the UK and the agents were european...dutch and german respectively at my guess but both spoke excellent english and, more importantly, had no trouble understanding mine.
- I was not palmed off to anyone, the people who answered the calls were the ones who helped me with my issues - and as I said these were fairly non trivial items (but not quite kernel dumps admittedly). They had to go look some things up but I was not put on hold or transferred away.
- They went outwith the scope of RH support when they realised the overall problem I was having was in an Oracle environment and gave advice on how they'd seen similar setups operating or how working systems differed config wise.
- Weren't afraid to quiz *me* about things I'd told them which either didn't make sense or were a bit vauge. I was often the one 'uhmming and ahhing' about their questions..which is a change from usually being able to wrap support reps up in knots.
- Overall polite and very helpful, I felt more like I was chatting to a colleague at the desk next to me rather than a stranger on the phone.

This sounds a bit like a redhat pr stunt, but it's not. Perhaps my problem wasn't as big as the ones you've tried but in both cases I was very happy.

The first time I called was as an absolute last resort (and was basically only because the company ordered me to so they could tick a box - stuff was broken, I had done everything correctly as far as I could tell but the project needed confirmation that I wasn't an idiot) and I was expecting the usual indian call centre, palmed off, phoned back, poor english, 1st line only tech. Pleasantly surprised when I got through to somone who within 2 minutes was talking at my level about the problem and being constructive about solving it.

Each call lasted ~ 1 hour...

So..I don't know, I think its great but have you go an example where it wasn't? I'm happy to call them these days but if there is a situation or scenario where the support *isn't* as good as I've experienced I'd be interested to hear about it. My company was also very happy and I suspect for larger projects they'll be quick to run alot of things past redhat support (even when they're working) just to get the 'yes we support that, you're doing it right' tick in the box.

Kev

Re:big freakin woop, their support still sucks

[A.Gideon]

I too have been reasonably (albeit less than perfectly) happy with RH support, having used it pretty much only for Cluster Suite-related issues. I'd not want to be completely dependent upon them, but that's part of why we use Linux, isn't it?

On the other hand, I recently attempted a 64 bit Oracle install on 64 bit RH. It was a nightmare, not the least because Oracle support was a nightmare. I was routed around from group to group, taking *days* to reach a group that actually dealt with the DB server product on Linux.

At one point, I was directed to a group that supports some inventory management product. What brilliance caused that, I still wonder.

And even once reaching the proper group, the support was pretty poor. The basic problem I was experiencing was dependency upon a great many 32 bit components, and they couldn't provide me with a definitive list of these. I'm sure *someone* in the company has the DB server running on a 64 bit RH install, and the answer to my question could have been had with a simple rpm query (modulo that this could include unnecessary RPMs). But finding this machine, or running this query, seemed well out of the scope of what Oracle support was willing to do.

So I was told "install until something breaks", figure out which RPM is needed, install the RPM, return to step 1.

Troll alert, but my question is...

[octaene]

...they still make Red Hat Linux? That's cute.

RHEL should have a free version, Should Axe Fedora

[rainhill]

RHEL should have a free version. And what about CentOS? you might say, I am sure RedHat can get (needs and deserves) a better karma, and a better name recognition by distributing RHEL for free, instead of CentOS doing that for them.

I would like to see that Fedora is axed or merged back into RedHat EL, rename it something like RedHat EL Beta or RHEL Express or.., at least it will give new users (kids that are being attracted to Ubuntu) a name recognition right away.

Currently it's confusing, when people speak about Fedora they rarely (if ever) mention RedHat, the next guy who hears Fedora conversation for the 1st time would think of it as just another distro, and would go with distros which currently has more buzz. and that NOT good for Redhat.

So much to say

[XB-70]

This release will be an interesting test of ORACLE's knock-off capabilities - let's see how long they take to do it. CentOS will be challenged to get it out there too. I wonder which will be first.

Red Hat should not be slagged for it's efforts. This is a major accomplishment. The virtualization aspect to this release is the wave of the future. Fundamentally, we are seeing the evolution of the server platform to a new level with radically improved capabilities. I'm very disappointed that so many of you are not giving credit where credit is due.

We are starting to see a wave of movement towards Linux in general. CIO's, towns, villages, states, provinces and governments are starting to appreciate the benefits of this tremendous software. Let's aid and abet their efforts and not demean what Red Hat has achieved.

Full disclosure: I run CentOS 4.x - uptime almost 2yrs!! I have installed and managed RH 7.x and 8.x w/ ORACLE. My laptop is a cheezy Thinkpad T30 with SuSE 10.2 and I no longer use MS except to manage my CrackBerry account online.

Re:So much to say

[ettlz]

Let's aid and abet their efforts and not demean what Red Hat has achieved.

Indeed. There's an awful lot of misplaced and, let's face it, downright ungrateful anti-Red Hat FUD flying about (especially in regards to Fedora which is a good distro for the more experienced user who wants cutting edge). Red Hat is one of the biggest kernel contributors. They have a high level of commitment to Free Software (especially with Fedora). I think many of those who slag off Red Hat do so for — horror of horrors! — trying to make money out of Linux. And some of this even goes beyond mere resentment. They don't seem to get that Red Hat's investment is actually benefitial to the community.

Re:So much to say

[rohan972]

They have a high level of commitment to Free Software (especially with Fedora).

Putting src.rpm available for public download deserves a mention also. They could be GPL compliant without doing that, yet some people whine because they enforce their trademark. Red Hat make CentOS possible ... deliberately.

Re:So much to say

[umrguy76]

Full disclosure: I run CentOS 4.x - uptime almost 2yrs!!

So what you're saying is you haven't applied any kernel security updates in almost 2 years? I hope this isn't a server facing the internet...

Re:So much to say

[XB-70]

You make a good point. I should have mentioned that this off-the-shelf, grey-box server is for internal use only and I am giving it my own non-scientific testing to see how long it runs without a re-boot.

Re:RHEL should have a free version, Should Axe Fed

[wwwillem]

Auch, I had mod points last week. I would have given you all five!!

the business model Linux was waiting for?

[Bloke down the pub]

Maybe this is the business model Linux was waiting for? Look at this way, the OS isn't a goal in itself - it's just a tool that lets you run applications. And the suits just love one-stop-shops.

I like this idea. It seems so obvious - afterwards.

Re:RHEL should have a free version, Should Axe Fed

[xappax]

it will give new users (kids that are being attracted to Ubuntu) a name recognition right away.

Ubuntu and RHEL are miles apart. It would be extremely difficult to get the people who are attracted to Ubuntu's user friendliness, modern feature set, and broad driver support to be turned on to an operating system whose primary niche is in a server rack. RHEL is primarily a reliable industrial strength server OS, and they put out a desktop distro on the side. Ubuntu is primarily a well designed, Mac OS-like desktop OS, and they include a lot of server features on the side (doesn't mean it's a bad server, but that's not its main emphasis).

For desktop features, Red Hat fans turn to Fedora because it's designed with an eye towards ordinary users as opposed to corporate data centers. You may be right that RHEL should be free, but Fedora definitely has an important and valuable place as a distro.

Discontinued Support??? (was: Re:wow )

[artgeeq]

Well, ok, you are just kidding BUT .... (and be forwarned, this might be a little off-topic), one vendor that builds on top of Red Hat Linux, Sophos, is discontuning support for older Red Hat versions, notably version 2.1.

I have wondered about the justification for this, particularly since I have better things to do than reinstall an OS. What does a new version of RHEL bring that the older versions did not? Note, Sophos did not give me much of an explanation. I would love to here what Slashdot members (who I often expect are better informed than I) think of this.

Re:RHEL should have a free version, Should Axe Fed

[mindstrm]

Why should it have a free version? RedHat decided NOT to do this anymore; they are protecting their trademark.

Because of the GPL (and what they provide to the community goes well beyond what the GPL requires), CentOS is made possible.

The effect you are describing (people thinking RedHat is somehow differnet than fedora) is *exactly* what RedHat Inc. wants.

Re:more nonsense

[CommanderIsm]

avoid this link - it does everything apart from telling you where to download it from how american - self serving dickheads