Red Hat Releases RHEL 5 Beta 2

The eventual release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) got a bit closer this week as the company announced the availability of Beta 2. Taking the “release early, release often” creed to heart, this beta comes just two months after the initial Beta 1 release.

The driving message behind RHEL 5 is that this is technology to reduce enterprise infrastructure costs. To achieve this, Red Hat continued the integration of virtualization technologies, with a new integrated storage and server solution for x86 included in this release.

High availability computing received some attention as well with updates to the Red Hat Cluster Suite. The Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Logical Volume Manager enable applications to be easily distributed across systems and accessed from any guest.

And, as users of Fedora Core are aware, this release continues Red Hat’s move away from up2date for software updates. As users of Beta 1 found out, up2date was replaced by yum and package installation is now handled by Pirut and Pup.

Company representatives said this would be the last beta before a first release candidate was made available. Estimated release of a final version is still scheduled for an early 2007 timeframe.

You can pick up a copy of the freely available RHEL 5 Beta by visiting the company’s ftp server.