Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch 129
Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have
liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial
Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March
14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will
better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as
Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years
and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen
hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's
high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand
with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."
R Hell (Score:2, Interesting)
A similar story with PHP. To update from PHP4 to PHP5 was a good day of compiling and tweaking to make sure I could get it installed alongside a pukka packaged version of PHP4, thereby not upsetting the package system and invalidating our support.
I know their method is to restrict the versions to make it very well understood and easy to support. It just seems a bit pants to pay for a system that has less update capabilities than most of the free linuxes.
Peter
CentOS 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
The two weeks lead time would appear to be borne out by this CentOS FAQ entry. [centos.org]
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you realise how long ago RHEL3 came out?
You couldn't force an upgrade
I don't think your criticisms should be aimed at RHEL. If you wanted new packages over stability or wanted to be able to force upgrade then you picked the wrong distro. You are not their target audience.
If the stability of fedora is enough for your needs maybe you should look there instead?
crash dump (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:R Hell (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been running Red Hat in an "enterprise" environment for about 8 years now. I've seen it go from an upgrade every 6 months to not needing an upgrade for the life of a box. Taking a look at our satellite server, I see 210 machines still subscribed to the RHEL 3, and even 13 subscribed to 2.1 (itaniums, hey, they still run!). These boxes are stable and secure, and I'm happy with that. They are performing their functions.
No doubt, it's not for everyone. Many people can't afford it, including myself in my personal life (alright, I could, but I really don't feel the need). Fedora is fine for those. Ubuntu is fine for those. Whatever other version you like is fine for those. If you want it to run with minimal upgrades, you stick with something that has support in some fashion for a long long time afterwards, like RHEL, where you can get security fixes for 7 years after release.
Re:CentOS 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
This is completely on topic, and I, like (probably) many other people, immediately wondered when CentOS's release would be after seeing this announcement.
Re:CentOS 5 (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
When you say that Red Hat is "greedy," do you mean that they are wrong for selling Linux? After all, people who buy Red Hat's Linux get support, oodles of manuals (good luck getting that brand-new SATA2 RAID card to work in Ubuntu without some arcane incantation halfway through your init (WTF is up with Ubuntu's init anyway? Sure, I appreciate that it's clean and nice-looking, but why is it so damn slow? Even Knoppix CDs boot faster on my friend's dev box than his Ubuntu installation does...)), and they also get a bit of a warranty, which is not something that comes with any flavor of free Linux.
Also, Ubuntu is nothing like Red Hat in their philosophy. Red Hat sells Linux in order to make a profit. Thus, they work on making their Linux fast, clean, and fully documented, in order to maximize sales. Ubuntu makes Linux in order to promote Linux's desktop share. Thus, they make their distro complete, with out-of-the-box support for proprietary drivers and with oodles of applications. Neither side is perfect: Red Hat's distro is not free if you want the enterprise support, and Ubuntu's distro is bloated and poorly designed for expert users.
Re:The wait is almost over? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I imagine we'll still be waiting after March 14th. Now that RHEL5 is official, we will start waiting for vendor support, Oracle, EMC, IBM, etc. Making it official is just step 1. People who use RHEL don't rush to update.
The bad news is now my RHCE, earned under RH v8, is officially expired :(
Real-time... for next time? (Score:2, Interesting)
RHEL3 (Score:2, Interesting)