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Red Hat Releases RHEL 6
alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."
At my workplace, Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing. I'd love to move servers off Windows, but it'll be hard to justify if it costs more.
CentOS usually releases 1 or 2 months after the RHEL release.
If you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux, yes. I know that my last companies used them for their Linux machines. Red Hat has many customers some of them big names like Qualcomm and NTT Telecom.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing.
At first, I guessed that it might have something to do with the common conception that one can run more things on a single Red Hat server than on a single Windows server. But a couple Google searches later, I found this Microsoft white paper claiming that Red Hat doesn't charge for client access licenses for RHEL.
Debian has "over 25000". If RHEL6 is "software you can weigh", then Debian must be "software designed to break your scale". :)
(Note: this is not a claim that "Debian is better" or any such nonsense. Merely pointing out that 2000 packages is hardly an impressive or unprecedented feat in itself.)
RedHat eventually added PostgreSQL 8.4 as an option for RHEL5, so it wouldn't be surprising to find that eventually they decide to make 9.0 (or 9.1) available for RHEL6. This really isn't as big of an issue as people think though. One of the PostgreSQL core team members is employed by RedHat, and the updated PostgreSQL packages available from their yum repo are extremely close to the RHEL builds. The same group of people is involved in the packaging and version updates, and the PostgreSQL yum repo is kept as current with security fixes as the RHEL releases of that same version are.
If you install EPEL you'll get an additional 4600+ packages.
However RHEL/CentOS are server operating systems, so a lot of packages that make sense on desktops are omitted.
... And so it comes to this.
1. You don't have to install all that crap.
2. RHEL includes support, so they still are cheaper.
CentOS is a server platform. You run databases and web servers on it. Don't put it on your desktop, that's not what it's for. The lack of desktop support is intentional, it allows them to focus on server performance and quality. My CentOS machines have less than 800 packages installed and they still feel bloated
Maybe you can run it on a desktop if you load it up with EPEL and rpmfusion, but at that point you are probably better off with something else.
Often times they will not even update featuresets for certain packages at all, they will just backport any security fixes that come out. This is both good and bad, good because you don't have to worry about updates breaking anything, bad because you may not be able to use the latest and greatest software packages out there. Whether you should be using bleeding edge at all for "enterprise" is another debate altogether.
Monstar L
Usually takes 6 weeks or so. You can follow the CentOS twitter feed here to keep up.
In addition, sounds like there may be new ways shortly for tracking CentOS development.
No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post, titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.
The less-interesting press releases are here (Red Hat Enables Expanded Deployment Flexibility and Application Portability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and here (Red Hat Sets a New Standard for the Next Generation of Operating Systems).
In reality a 5 year old kernel may well not support the new hardware.
Does this include the directory server that mac's and windows machines can work with ?
Windows machines have poor support for "directory servers" compared to most other OSs. If you mean an Active Directory replacement, no, because Windows machines expect that Active Directory has LDAP, Kerberos, CIFS, DNS and a few other services *all* running on the "directory server" (where other OSs allow these to be separated and/or scaled differently). If you need AD support with GPOs etc., you can consider trying samba4, but it's still in alpha (although some sites are running it in production). If you just need to authenticate Windows desktops, and don't need GPO-only features (but user/group policies are sufficient, if crufty), samba-3.5 as provided in RHEL6 may be sufficient.
The OpenLDAP included with RHEL6 is good enough for all other operating systems with support for "directory servers", including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris, AIX etc.
Of course, RH would prefer to sell you RHDS subscriptions ...
I often wonder the same thing. I am inclined to think they are using "i386" as a moniker for "32-bit Intel x86 processors." Will RHEL6 actually load on a honest-to-goodness 386 box from 1991? I have a feeling not, and that a i586-class, or perhaps even i1686-class, processor is really required to run the thing.
Numerous packages (like glibc) have both 'i386' and 'i686' packages available.