Two years in the making, RHEL 5 is finally ready. The result? With Xen, SELinux, the Red Hat Global File System, and more, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 raises the bar for commercial Linux. We break down the new features and walk you through creating your first virtual machine.
Up until 2003 and culminating with the release of Red Hat 9 Linux, Red Hat’s Linux distribution attempted to be all things to all people. The same software would power an enterprise server and serve as a toy for a Linux hobbyist. Obviously, those two customers have different expectations and requirements, so subsequent releases of Red Hat’s Linux were bifurcated: Red Hat Enterprise Linux was suited for corporate users, and (the on- and off-again endorsed) Fedora Linux was tailored to hobbyists and single desktops. Organizations that wanted to deploy Linux on desktops could buy such a version, but only in packages of five or more licenses.
With the launch of RHEL5, you will be able to buy a single RHEL5 client desktop if you wish. Nick Carr, a Red Hat Marketing Manager, noted that Red Hat is seeing steady growth of Linux on the desktop as various companies find that Linux is good enough for and the cost savings are hard to beat.
There are three key differences between the server and desktop versions of RHEL5:
The server version supports a greater range of CPUs;
The client version is less expensive; and
The client version does not include a number of server applications. For example, the client version of RHEL5 does not include (nor does Red Hat support) an anonymous FTP service.
Even if the client version is watered down, the RHEL5 client distro is far more secure than the Microsoft…
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