Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Releases RHEL 6 Public Beta 1
An anonymous reader writes "It was way back on 2006-09-07 when Red Hat released its first public beta of Enterprise Linux 5. Today, after more than three years, Red Hat finally releases its first public beta of its next-generation OS: RHEL 6 public beta 1. From the news release: 'We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today's Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners, and members of the public to install, test, and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.'"
We have an environment with AMD Opteron 270 based servers where we use virtualization heavily. We either have to give up on the servers or on RHEL 6. I think that we'll stick with EL5 until we go into a server refresh cycle.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
The packages mostly match those in Fedora 12, which makes sense as that came out in November and FC13 isn't released yet. However, they have bumped some things. Most notably, the FC12 kernel was 2.6.31, while RHEL6 uses 2.6.32. That's not surprising given a fair number of virtualization and performance features, as well as bug fixes, happened for 2.6.32.
This is the attitude that makes commercial open-source so difficult. Until Redhat employ every developer whose code is used in their distro, you can accuse them of freeloading. Redhat contribute to a variety of core packages, including the kernel. That's enough to keep me happy. I'm not saying they're perfect, but they're not bad. The very existence of CentOS should show that they're sticking to the GPL. But you also have to remember is all those patches that go back upstream, and appear in Debian, SuSE and the rest.
Why do newbie users even need to care about that? If you pick a distribution that has a good set of packages, they should rarely have to leave the ones provided with it. Run whatever front-end for package management you've got, make sure all the optional repositories are enabled, and there should be so many packages there the hard part is sorting through them all--not finding even more. Particularly given that so many things that used to be run as local apps have moved onto web applications nowadays, the main headaches for Linux newbies I see is getting their hardware working and making Flash work.
Thank you backwardMechanic. Calling RedHat freeloaders is completely ignoring all the contributions they made to OpenSource. They did not write 100% of the code that RHEL runs on but they did fix a lot of issues that would never be taken cared off by the upstream project for lack of coolness. The reality today is that the Kernel is mostly developed by programmers paid by large corporations such as RedHat. Same goes for Novell who employs a lot of opensource hackers.