Novell, Red Hat Release Updated Distributions

Joyce writes "Novell today announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), containing enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability. Several improvements specific to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 are also included. Delivering Xen version 3.2, SP2 includes several virtualization advances, including support for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 and the live migration of those Windows Server guests across physical machines. Advances in high availability and storage management such as updates to Heartbeat 2 and OCFS2 are also included." And an anonymous reader points out today's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.2, which brings "a broad refresh of hardware support and improved quality, combined with new features and enhancements in areas such as virtualization, desktop, networking, storage & clustering and security. Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of memory, is now possible. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Desktop includes enhanced support for laptop suspend/hibernate and resume, updated graphics drivers and a comprehensive update of desktop applications, including OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox v3," and points out this guide for upgrading your RHEE system.

Comments

CentOS

[Shadow_139]

Anybody know if CentOS has updated yet?

Re:CentOS

[kylehase]

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=11128&forum=37#forumpost35904

We have goals for release ... our goals are:

First time release (for example, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0): Our target goal is 1 month. This is obviously the longest situation as this is a BRANCH or version of CentOS that has never been tested and it requires much QA and usability tests, etc.

Update set release (for example, 3.9, 4.5, 5.1): Our target goal is two weeks. This type of update normally changes 10%-30% of the packages in it's tree and requires more QA than individual releases but less time to test than a whole new tree. Longest time has been one month.

Normal security or bugfix updates between update sets: Our target goal is 72 hours and we normally complete these within 24 hours.

So ... for 5.1 (and the upcoming 4.6) our goal for each is 2 weeks to finish the updates and get an ISO set. Then 2-3 days to get them synced to all the internal mirrors and another 2-3 days to get them to all the external public mirrors. At that point there will be a release announcement.

The realistic date that I would expect the release announcement (if we have no unforeseen problems) would be in the neighborhood of 26-30 November 2007.

TOO SOON

[Anonymous Coward]

WOAH!! You've overshot the synchronized release by at least 5 months!

No way...

[drc003]

Support for fully virtualized BSOD? YAY!

I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[pembo13]

So to recap:

RedHat is the company who makes OSS work as much as possible, and contributes huge amounts of work to all areas of OSS

Novel is the company who does a similar amount of work, maybe less, but has a lot of buddy-buddy Microsoft ads all over the internet

Canonical is the one who produces Ubuntu

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Time to actually use FACTS in your post. Novell and Red Hat both contribute tons of support towards F/OSS products. Use KDE or Gnome ever? Thank Novell. Using SAMBA to authenticate to AD or otherwise use complicated SAMBA features, thank Novell. Both RH and Novell have done a LOT for Linux; more than Canonical has. They are also not "Buddy Buddy" with Microsoft. The deal was pure business in a case where they wanted to make sure their customers did not defect for fear of lawsuit or reprisal from MS.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[pembo13]

Umm... so you agree with me, except for the buddy-buddy part? About that, I see a Microsoft-Novel full motion web ad almost every day these day.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[bsDaemon]

I thought that is what he said to begin with -- that RH and Novell were already top contributers and that Canonical, which all they have done is make Ubuntu, is more or less a johnny-come-lately trying to dictate terms and more efficiently leverage the dev time of RH and Novell for their own gain.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[trolltalk.com]

It's funny, for years we've bitched and moaned about having to pay the "Microsoft Tax."

Now Microsoft has to start paying the "F/OSS Tax" and we STILL bitch and moan.

Novell got them for almost a half billion, thanks to F/OSS.

Microsoft is being forced to support ODF, thanks to F/OSS.

Google is eating Microsofts' lunch in search, thanks to F/OSS.

... and this is just the beginning.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[R_Dorothy]

A johnny-come-lately with a higher public profile than RH and Novell put together. I've had several of my non-techie friends asking me about Ubuntu as they've heard of it and might know it's Linux but I've never had anyone in the pub ask me: "So what's this 'Red Hat' I keep hearing about? Is it any good?"

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with Shuttleworth here but that's what Ubuntu brings to the party.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[bsDaemon]

RedHat and Novell/SuSE used to have relatively high profiles. You used to be able to buy boxed sets of them at CompUSA and places, containing several CD-ROMS and a manual, and some other stuff.

You can't anymore, though, and that's a shame.

Re:I guess Novel and Redhat were already in sync

[Uncle Focker]

I like how all you did was back up his statement of:

RedHat is the company who makes OSS work as much as possible, and contributes huge amounts of work to all areas of OSS and

Novel is the company who does a similar amount of work, maybe less, but has a lot of buddy-buddy Microsoft ads all over the internet

So basically he already stated how they've contributed a ton of work to F/OSS products. What exactly was your complaint other than the remark about Novel and Microsoft? You just rehashed everything with different wording.

Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[PineHall]

Every distribution is including Firefox 3 before its final release. RHEL is known for its stability and here it is including a beta or release candidate product. Firefox 3 RC1 (or Beta5) must be really solid.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Anonymous Coward]

It is.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[the_B0fh]

RHELL has always been about marketing and not what's best for consumers. Remember gcc 2.96? Remember libc2? It's been going on for a LONG LONG time

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, wouldn't you want to use Firefox 3 RC1? I'm using it right now and it's blazing fast! And even with four windows open, I haven't had any problems with it crashi

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Nimey]

That wasn't RHEL back then, dumbass. It was just Red Hat, which wasn't particularly aimed at anyone, certainly not large businesses.

gcc 2.96 was a stupid, boneheaded thing for them to have done, but it's not like it was included in something that was supposed to be /reliable/.

And I don't know WTH you're saying about libc2. I assume that's glibc2, which was first in Debian 2.1, which I used and had no especial problem with.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[pizzach]

That's because a lot of packages depend on Firefox. When you switch versions around haphazardly you run into bugs and binary incompatibility. If you look at older Ubuntu released for example, they don't usually backport firefox.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[matt me]

Yes it is.. END CARRIER JOKE

No really, I have fewer problems with beta 5 in Ubuntu hardy than I did with firefox 2.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Wdomburg]

Eh? The move to glibc2 was a painful transition every distribution was making. Red Hat at least did a good job of proving compat libs.

And as maligned as gcc 2.96 was, it was a fairly solid compiler. The vast majority of compile failures were bad code that older versions of GCC allowed.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[RiotingPacifist]

or Firefox2 was really bad on linux.

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[the_B0fh]

I'm not sure how it was considered good when gcc itself says:
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html

IIRC, the reason for going to 2.96 was an edge case of bash not working on some fringe (big iron?) platform and one other thing.

Not a reason to move to 2.96.

On glibc2 - they moved before it was ready for production. yes, some people say this helps them find more bugs and helps push it production ready - if this is the case, why do you guys bitch about Microsoft pushing out beta stuff as production ready? That's a bit hypocritical, yes?

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Culture20]

Considering RHEL 5 Desktop was still using FF1.5, you may have something there (at least from RH's perspective).

Re:Firefox 3 included (RHEL)

[Wdomburg]

There was no support for ia64 in 2.95 period. Not a matter of a single application not working. Additionally 2.95 suffered from poor standards compliance and an incomplete C++ implementation.

Of course the upstream maintainers aren't going to support a vendor branch. You fork it, you fix it. When you have the resources, sometimes that makes sense.sometimes that makes sense. In this case Red Hat was in a good position to do so since they employed a substantial number of key GCC developers. In fact it was the engineers they inherited from Cygnus who suggested they move to a stabalized version in the first place. The main stink arose mostly from miscommunication and the use of the 2.96 version moniker (later renamed 2.96RH to make it clear that it was a forked release).

And none of that reflects on the quality of the compiler itself. There were a handful of quickly addressed bugs in the early releases, but the majority of the poor reputation really rests on people erroneously blaming the compiler for not accepting sloppy code. I've built literally thousands of packages (remember, it's still the production compiler in RHEL 2.1AS) without running into a single bug attributable to the compiler.

As for whether Red Hat is "all about marketing", you should note that Red Hat continues to support software compiled against that ABI in their current production release. By the time that falls out of maintenance they will have provided FOURTEEN YEARS of support. That, my friend, is giving value to their consumers.

Somewhere Mark Shuttleworth is crying...

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading all about Shuttleworth vs Seigo vs Everybody I couldn't help but laugh when the next headline on /. is that Novell and RedHat are somehow already synced up enough to release at the same time.

*as Phil Ken Sebben from HBAAL*

Ha Ha! Irony!

-AC

CentOS 5.2

[slashkitty]

Anyone know how long it takes Centos to follow through? I look forward to their stable updates.

Re:CentOS 5.2

[Wdomburg]

RHEL 4.6 came out on 11-16, CentOS 4.6 came out on 12-16.
RHEL 5.4 came out on 11-08, CentOS 5.1 came out on 12-02.

Judging by that, a month sounds likely. Of course I'm sure the answer they would give is "when it's done". :)

Higher public profile among whom?!

[snikulin]

Among /.-ers?
Really Big and Evil Business(TM) cares very little about JCL.

But it does about Novel and RH.

eCryptfs now in RHEL 5.2

[omnirealm]

Red Hat is making strides with adopting data-at-rest encryption. RHEL 5.2 now includes eCryptfs as a technology preview.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.2/html/Release_Notes/RELEASE-NOTES-U2-x86-en.html
http://ecryptfs.sf.net/