The existence of Red Hat can be traced back to 1994 when Marc Ewing
created his own distribution of Linux, which he named Red Hat
Linux. A year later Bob Young purchased Marc's business, and
named the new company, Red Hat Software.
In 2003 Red Hat announced their plan to partially abandon their legacy
as a user friendly, desktop distribution and to focus their efforts on
their enterprise server products and paid support programs under a
brand new name, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (often abbreviated to RHEL) is a commercial
Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. However, as RHEL is
based completely on free and open source software, the entire source
code is available to download. A number of other
organisations
have compiled their own versions of RHEL which essentially are the same
as RHEL.
The key attributte of RHEL 5 which makes it stand out is its integrated Xen virtualization
support. This
feature enables the distro either to host Linux guest instances with
Xen-aware kernels, or to host unmodified guest operating systems, such
as Windows. This lets a user run a number of different
operating
systems concurrently, on the same physical server.
Consequently,
firms can consolidate current workloads onto a single server, making
Linux even more cost efficient.
One
of RHEL 5's most
distinctive features is its support for SELinux, which bolsters the
security of the Linux machines on which it's deployed by meting out to
applications and users only those rights explicitly granted by
policy. It also includes support for Intel
Network
Accelerator Technology, has IPSEC enhancements, ExecShield
enhancements, such as a call frame Canary word, strengthen hacker
defenses, and new audit features.
Although this is a commercial distribution, it is important to
recognise the fact that Red Hat has made enormous contributions to free
and Open Source software. For example, Red Hat is one of the
leading contributors to the development of the Linux kernel.
It
has written a number of key administration frameworks including the RPM
package manager, anaconda, up2date. It also plays a major
role in
the development of programmers' 'essentials' such as gcc, binutils,
glibc2. The firm is also very active in GNOME,
the
development of
service management tools, system clustering and much more.
Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.1 Key
Facts
Developer:
Red Hat,
Inc
Price:
Basic
Subscription
(1 year web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents) $349
Standard Subscription (1 year 12x5 phone support, 1 year web, unlimited
incidents) $799
Premium Subscription (1 year 24x7 phone support, 1 year web, unlimited
incidents) $1,299
Released:
18
November 2007
Installation
Media:
ISO
images, CD, DVD
Architectures
supported:
Intel
x86, Intel
IA-64, PowerPC, AMD64, Itanium II, zSeries, S/390
