Dominant Linux seller Red Hat will begin offering the newest incarnation of its product for business customers on Wednesday, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, a version that opens several new markets for the company. Read the rest of the report at News.com and “read more” for the full press release.
Leading Hardware and Software Vendors Announce Support and Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Red Hat’s position in the Datacenter is solidified with latest release.
RALEIGH, NC, October 22, 2003 – Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the world’s
premier open source software provider, today announced a major milestone in
the company’s long-term strategy of delivering an Open Source Architecture
to the enterprise. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is now available supporting
a greatly increased range of IT deployments and spanning seven hardware
architectures. Emphasizing scalability, performance and extended system
coverage, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 provides a stable operating system
platform that enables customers to realize the benefits of open source
solutions across their complete computing infrastructure – from the desktop
to the largest server.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 marks a significant achievement in the
maturation of open source,” said Paul Cormier, Executive Vice president of
Engineering at Red Hat. “This release will act as the unifying platform,
and will support seven hardware architectures for both client and server
deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has gained the reputation as the de-
facto enterprise Linux standard. This second generation solution from
Red Hat will strengthen Red Hat’s global foothold in the enterprise and
eliminate the need for proprietary Unix.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 was developed in close collaboration with customers, hardware manufacturers and software partners with a focus on performance, scalability, and the support of of a secure, consistent enterprise-wide platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 includes numerous features providing a potent combination of the latest technical features and enterprise stability:
– Native Posix Threading Library provides significant performance improvement for multi-threading applications.
– Scalability improvements include support for larger SMP, memory and I/O configurations.
– Single code base improves code stability, maintainability and security.
– Supported hardware architectures include Intel x86 and Itanium, AMD AMD64, IBM zSeries, iSeries , pSeries, and S/390.
“Adecco’s back office manages more than one-half million employees
annually, so we are continuously seeking improvements in performance,
reliability and scalability,” said Joseph Pagliaccio, Director of
Enterprise Systems for Adecco USA. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3’s
support of additional addressable memory, we will potentially derive
savings and improve performance in our enterprise database server
infrastructure.”
Adecco, based in Zurich, is the world’s largest HR solutions company with
5,800 offices across 67 territories and serves 100,000 Clients and 650,000
Associates each day.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is available now as part of an annual
subscription that includes Red Hat Network and services. Current Red Hat
Enterprise Linux subscribers can upgrade now via Red Hat Network. Red Hat
OEM partners will deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 AS, ES and WS in
pre-configured hardware solutions in the next 30-60 days. Several leading
ISV applications are already available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and
others have committed to be available in the near term. For more
information please visit http://www.redhat.com for more information or call
866-2-REDHAT, extension 45009.
Industry Support
AMD
“Systems based on AMD Opteron(tm) and AMD Athlon(tm) processors running
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 deliver high performance computing to run
mission-critical applications in the data center and on the desktop,” said
Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of AMD’s Microprocessor
Business Unit. “Today and tomorrow, AMD and Red Hat deliver performance,
scalability and value to our customers. With AMD64 technology, AMD and
Red Hat deliver a dynamic 64-bit computing environment that delivers
native, high-performance 32-bit and powerful 64-bit applications.”
BEA
“Linux has emerged as BEA’s fastest growing deployment operating system
platform,” said Bob Griswold, vice president and general manager, Java
Runtime Products Group, at BEA Systems. “BEA and Red Hat are working
closely together- through engineering collaboration, joint solutions and
joint support offerings- to optimize, bring to market and support the
industry’s leading J2EE on enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is
an important part of our partnership and offers continued advancement in
performance, reliability and quality.”
Dell
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Precision
workstations extends the performance, reliability and cost benefits of
standardized, open architectures over proprietary platforms in the
Datacenter,” said Pete Morowski, vice president of software, Dell Product
Group. “The Dell-Red Hat One Source Alliance makes it easy for customers to
purchase or upgrade their Red Hat environment, taking full advantage of new
capabilities, such as enhanced performance and expanded memory.”
Fujitsu
“The launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is great news for our customers,”
said Akira Yamanaka, Group President of Server Systems Group at Fujitsu.
“Red Hat and Fujitsu are cooperating together to reinforce Linux
functionality, focusing on enterprise areas. In the course of such efforts,
we are pleased to make this release part of our reliable offering to
deliver to enterprise customers.”
Hitachi
“Hitachi, Ltd. welcomes the announcement from Red Hat, Inc. of the release
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3based on the latest technology,”Katsuya
Takanashi, Executive General Manager of Software Division, Hitachi, Ltd.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 has been enhanced for enterprise usage, and
Hitachi, Ltd. expects that the announcement of this product will enlarge
the Linux enterprise market.”
HP
“HP is bringing the powerful and flexible Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
platform to enterprise customers on leading HP industry-standard
solutions,” said Martin Fink, vice president of Linux, HP Enterprise
Storage and Servers. “HP is delivering on its commitment to put customers
first, offering them solutions with the best price and performance
available on the market today.”
IBM
“Customers are demanding a solution broad enough to cover the entire
computing space. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is getting us closer to that
goal,” said Jim Stallings, general manager of Linux at IBM. “Customers
recognize that a standards-based platform will save them time, money and
improve productivity from workstations and file and print, to clusters and
the datacenter. Customers are anticipating this release, and IBM welcomes
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to the marketplace.”
Intel
‘Intel offers the industry’s most pervasive, flexible and cost effective
platforms for enterprise based on a choice of operating systems, including
Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 takes advantage of the increased cache
available on Intel Itanium-based servers to improve the performance of
enterprise computing solutions,” said Richard Wirt, senior fellow and
General Manager, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Corporation.
“IT departments need performance but they also want scalable, manageable
and reliable enterprise solutions. Intel Xeon processor and Itanium2
processor-based servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 provide these
capabilities.”
NEC
“NEC and Red Hat have been working together closely to provide global
enterprise customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on NEC Express 5800 and
TX7 servers,” said Yasuo Iwaok, Executive General Manager, 2nd Computers
Software Division, NEC Corporation. “The enhanced functionality of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 will provide an even more powerful solution to
the enterprise. We are excited to expand the global enterprise market with
Red Hat.”
Oracle
“Oracle and Red Hat continue to deliver on our deep commitment to enable
low cost, standards-based computing infrastructure for customers,” said
Dave Dargo, vice president, Linux Program Office at Oracle.
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 we offer our joint customers a fully
tested, optimized and certified platform to run their mission critical
systems along with integrated support, that helps ensure the highest level
of service from day one.”
Rackspace
“The release of Redhat Enterprise Server 3 is a critical milestone in the overall strategy of providing Fanatical SupportT to Rackspace customers.”
said Dirk Elmendorf, Chief Technology Evangelist, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “The introduction of a standard 64-bit distribution will enable us to offer solutions that scale even further for those enterprise customers
that require a higher level of computing power for their business applications. The integration of Red Hat Network provides us with a flexible, scalable and cost-effective opportunity to enhance our level of service for our Linux customers.”
Red Hat hip hip hura!!!!!!
Maybe wi’ll a version 4 based on Fedora;) Version 3 is based on RHL 9;)
Maybe wi’ll a version 4 based on Fedora;)
I think this is the idea of the project, to be a beta of sorts or probably more accuratly a place for free/risky thinking aswell as rapid development.
Also I remember reading the threads mentioned in the article about the schools administrator and the following threads helped to address his issues which weren’t mentioned in the artical, in short the dollar break schools get is enormous.
I do not thinks RHEL 3.0 is based on RH 9 only. I know that RHEL will have at least 2.4.21 kernel while RH 9 does not support the kernel version beyond 2.4.20 even with updates.
RHEL 3.0 is a long term project. I think it started about 1 year ago. So it should give some really good enhancements.
I suppose nearly all of RH’s QA resources go into RHEL. That would explain the condition of Fedora.
when will RH 9.1 be released? (or will it be Fedora final?)
It will be Fedora Core 1.0 , release date and similar can be found at http://fedora.redhat.com/
Isnt Fedora just the exploitation of free developers by a commercial linux distro? RedHat is known to be a bad community player to say the least (broken compilers, modified KDE…).
Why would any free developer support Fedora, when there are better alternatives like Mandrake, Debian, ArkLinux to name a few.
No one is forced to contribute to Fedora. Thus I wouldn’t call it exploitation. People who contribute to it surely don’t do so because they think that Fedora is inferior.
i dont want to pay redhat. how can build this dist from srpms ?
thanks
I can’t regard Debian, Mandrake or ArkLinux as “better alternatives” when they aren’t as good IMNSHO. I can’t regard distributions built on non-free software as any kind of alternative at all. RedHat Means Source.
The same people (Red Hat employees) made the “broken compiler” which everyone except Debian eventually shipped because it was much better than the “not broken” (but hopelessly obsolete) compiler, as made the current compilers. Non-RH distro companies amusingly call this the “Free Software community” but it’s still Red Hat employees.
If you wish to look at it very cynically, all Linux development is “exploitation”, and marriage is “prostitution” with government approval, and everything everyone does is intended to rip off everyone else. I prefer to spend my time giving back, rather than stabbing backs.
Everyone not wanting to pay a subsription fee for using a enterprise ready OS with a long stable release cycle, can just use Debian.
If u can pay for Oracle or BEA you sura as hell can afford RHEL, otherwise, like I said there is Debian.
If only Debian could be marketed like this a bit more, in fact i think Bruce Perens has some idea like that coming up.
Dont get me wrong Red Hat is exellent, but so is Debian (And its gratis too ;-)).
I dont want to pay redhat. how can build this dist from srpms ?
thanks
Thats alright, if you don’t want to pay for Redhat Enterpise 3 then install Fedora 1.0 once it has been released. That is what Redhat Enterprise is based on.
RedHat is known to be a bad community player to say the least (broken compilers, modified KDE…).
The broken compiler wasn’t the one Redhat shipped, The broken one was the compiler everyone else shipped, Infact
the only reason why code broke is because people didn’t know how to write standard C++ code!
That compiler was the first fully ISO C99 and ISO C++ compliant compiler to date meaning everyone was pissed off Redhat went and made them read how to program.
I’ll leave the KDE/bad company thing for someone who has a clue, or is just mis-informed. Not someone who know’s they’re full of it but want to start an argument.
The broken compiler *was* the one Red Hat shipped. ISO C-compliant or not, something on a Linux system that produced broken executables and couldn’t even be used to compile the kernel normally is very broken.
Anyway, if it was the best thing out there, why’d they switch back?
Standards compliance isn’t the only thing that’s looked for in a program. Do you remember Amaya? Did anyone ever use that as a primary browser?
redhat didn’t switch back, they using 2.96 until their 7.3 release, then they switched to the new 3.2 series of compilers… That series is (almost) ISO C(++) compliant, so they didn’t need to modify it for compliancy.
Please correct me if I’m wrong…
> RedHat is known to be a bad community player to say the least
Dude, crack is bad for you.
Why are there so many distros based on redhat, and redhat’s tools (like kudzu, anaconda, rpm, etc..)?
Redhat keeps its project in the most open source way of all distros! I dont even want to go into the BS that Yast uses for a license. So in a release kde wasnt the best, I dont know about the compilers though. So what! Everyone makes mistakes! Like suse dosnt still ship badly broken GNOME packages? Is that going to remove all the amazing contributions that redhat has done to the linux and opensource community? How many popular OSS projects have been started by them compared to other distros? They let you download their isos for free (unlike suse *cough*). Redhat is one of the best distros out there, and it has hired some of the best OSS developers (like Alan Cox, and Owen Taylor, and many more). Is there any other distro out there that releases backports of security patches as fast?
And the Fedora project is just a continuation of that fact. RH saw that the RHL was not profittable for them enough, so instead of charging money for it (like all the trolls have been predicting for years) like *other distros* they turned it into a community project. That way they can be invovled, but it will cost them less money.
Why dont you get a clue before you start trolling? Redhat is the best distro in terms of professionalism, and Open Source commitment. They definatly did more then you ever will.
This should help with some questions.
http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html
Pascal I’m not sure either but the artical says “Red Hat Linux 7 also happens to be the first Linux distributions using the current version of glibc, 2.2.x” Which I think implys they were still using it.
“That series is (almost) ISO C(++) compliant, so they didn’t need to modify it for compliancy.”
But they have still many patches (often taken from a cvs snapshot, sometimes patches which haven’t yet accepted upstream) in their gcc. But this is good because those patches fix known bugs. I have much respect for Red Hat’s glibc, binutils, and gcc developers.
I couldn’t agree more, and if the guy bothered to read the artical he’d see that “The scalability of the threading has gone from being able to support 1,200 to 32,000 threads”
Thanks in large part by two Redhat employees (NPTL threading). But did redhat hide this in thier server and only allow paying customers the benifit? No, They uploaded it to the kernel base for 2.6. I can think of a few distro’s that wouldn’t do that. they’d stamp a offensive patent on it and nobody would say a thing cause they’re not redhat the M$ of linux.
Since its open source, where can I download sources of RHEL? I want to try it out.
Do you honestly believe that you would even HAVE a community without RedHat? LOL They play better with the community than all of the rest of the community combined.
“I can’t regard Debian, Mandrake or ArkLinux as “better alternatives” when they aren’t as good IMNSHO. I can’t regard distributions built on non-free software as any kind of alternative at all. RedHat Means Source.”
Erm, none of the distributions mentioned above are built on non-free software.
Besides, claiming that RedHat is more Free in terms of philosophy than Debian is a joke. All software within Debian main must be Free as defined in debian-legal’s (http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal) interpretation of the Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines). Conversely, software within the RedHat distribution must simply be under one of the licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (http://opensource.org/) which has far less stringent requirements. Plus, RedHat has no equivalent of Debian’s Social Contract with the Free Software community (http://www.debian.org/social_contract).
“The same people (Red Hat employees) made the “broken compiler” which everyone except Debian eventually shipped because it was much better than the “not broken” (but hopelessly obsolete) compiler, as made the current compilers. Non-RH distro companies amusingly call this the “Free Software community” but it’s still Red Hat employees.”
Lol! So RedHat wrote GCC now? Come on, do a little research into what you’re talking about before you shoot off your mouth.
Answer: no, they didn’t. They shipped a pre-release version, a development snapshot of the GNU C Compiler (yes, the name should give a little clue that the GNU Project wrote it, not RedHat) the use of which undeniably resulted in it compiling broken executables for whatever reason. Ergo, they made a mistake and justifiably got flamed for it. No big deal, but there’s no sense in trying to rewrite history.
“Since its open source, where can I download sources of RHEL? I want to try it out.”
It being Open Source doesn’t mean it has to be put up for free download over the net. They must simply provide source (or a written offer for said source) to all those who receive the binaries, i.e. all those who purchase RHEL. [Yes, I know that only applies to GPLed code, but since the GPL has the most onerous distribution requirements it would make sense for them to simply extend the “written offer” approach to cover the whole distribution, including BSD and MIT-licensed code, etc.]
I suppose there’s nothing to prevent someone from putting the source up for download themselves once they get their hands on it but a) you buy RHEL for the bundled support contract, so what’s the point and b) unless you already had a copy of RHEL yourself for comparison, how would you know it was *really* the pristine source for RHEL and not some trojaned/backdoored version?
Oops!
That should be “They must simply provide source (or a written offer for said source) to all those who receive the binaries FROM THEM”
Anyone remember a while back Microsoft issues a white paper in regards to Windows 2003 vs Red Hat Enterprise 2.1? I would just love to see the same test done again but using Red Hat Enterprise 3.0.
Hmm..
Per Bothner
Joe Buck (Synopsys)
David Edelsohn (IBM)
Kaveh R. Ghazi
Torbjorn Granlund (Swox AB)
Jeffrey A. Law (Red Hat)
Marc Lehmann (Technische Universität Karlsruhe)
Jason Merrill (Red Hat)
David Miller (Red Hat)
Mark Mitchell (CodeSourcery)
Toon Moene (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut)
Gerald Pfeifer (Centro di Ingegneria Economica e Sociale, Università della Calabria)
Joel Sherrill (OAR Corporation)
Jim Wilson (Specifix Inc)
I don’t see too many other distros listed with members here.. Wait, there are NO OTHERS..
http://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html
Not to turn this into a grand pissing contest, however, the main backer of the x86-64 port of the GNU development tool chain is SuSE. Who is the biggest supporter of the x86-64? SuSE.
http://www.x86-64.org/contributors/gnulinux
Not a Red Hat email address to be found.
Please stop bringing up this, “my distro is better than yours”. Everyone, apart from SCO/Caldera, has contributed to the development of Linux in some form or another.
??
You might want to read what I wrote one more time. I honestly don’t understand how you can think that your post is a relevant response to my own. I’m sure RedHat has made contributions to GCC, and I made no statements to the contrary. But that’s irrelevant: the anonymous poster claimed in his incredible ignorance that RedHat had written GCC, and I merely pointed out that this is a load of twaddle.
Besides, right at the top of the http://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html page that you link to is the statement “The steering committee was founded in 1998 with the intent of preventing any particular individual, group or organization from getting control over the project.” Yet more evidence (from the horse’s mouth, this time) that saying RedHat wrote GCC or controls the direction of the project is complete rubbish, which was the whole point of my previous post.
I didn’t bring it up.
Syntaxis:
“saying RedHat wrote GCC or controls the direction of the project is complete rubbish, which was the whole point of my previous post.”
While I agree with you, there are no other distributions with members on the steering committee. 😉
Not to troll, but I am a unix engineer for a fortune 500 company. I used to work for the American Stock Exchange. I have to laugh at all “this distro is better than this distro” talk and esp. the “little” players (distros) are better than redhat jaz. Here’s the fact jack…the stock exchange and lots of other companies are starting/started re-evaluating their costs and hav made Linux a viable option…they aren’t looking to install Suse, Debian, or Mandrake. They are looking at RedHat Enterprise Linux (AS, ES, WS) because RedHat is viewed, incorrectly, as Linux, because they are very business oriented, because they have a long history as a player in the field and, simply, because they make a great distribution, backed by solid support. Debian will never be approved by any sane corporation no matter how nice apt-get is. I think fedora rocks and it is a great way to keep pushing forward while redhat, like any normal company, can concentrate on profit via business sales with enterprise. This is the only way linux becomes a viable alternative to MS and to Solaris.
“The broken compiler *was* the one Red Hat shipped. ISO C-compliant or not, something on a Linux system that produced broken executables and couldn’t even be used to compile the kernel normally is very broken.”
That was a *long* freaking time ago. Secondly, one of the main kernel hackers (Alan Cox) works for RedHat. You’ll also note that mistake has not been repeated. Every distribution has had it’s failings, they’re made by humans, mistakes are made, life goes on, stop your whining.
[i]
The broken compiler *was* the one Red Hat shipped. ISO C-compliant or not, something on a Linux system that produced broken executables and couldn’t even be used to compile the kernel normally is very broken.
<i/>
It is for the same reason that Galileo was persecuted because he was the first to realize that the earth was round. According to you, his idea (RedHat’s compiler) was broken and every other persons’ mind (code) was normal.
Hate to say this, but people, including myself, like Linux to be free as in free beer. It is kind of like the music industry trying to make people pay $18.00 for a CD but without the legal ability to do so. RedHat tried to force people to pay for security updates. However, rather than paying, people decided to either go with freshrpms.net or with another distro like debian or gentoo. I myself went with Debian because I don’t know how trustworthy freshrpms is. This is the only reason why RedHat decided to sponsor the Fedora project. They were losing many users to different distributions and exposing people to the power of apt. However, the Fedora Project won’t save them. People will just now download and install Fedora at home and at work. And as people start doing this, you will see the name RedHat lose it’s value and significance, and the Fedora name increase its. Can anyone else see Fedora Enterprise 4.0 in 3 years.
Don’t they actually do compiler development work for Apple. I think I read this somewhere but not sure where anymore. I think it is highly unlikely that released a buggy compiler. It broke some things but maybe that was necessary.
“Not to troll, but I am a unix engineer for a fortune 500 company. I used to work for the American Stock Exchange.”
If you want to use your (fictional?) career experience to bolster your rhetoric, please provide your real name, the company you work for, and a means for us to verify your claims. Otherwise, let your assertions stand on their own merit.
“Debian will never be approved by any sane corporation no matter how nice apt-get is.”
Why not? The quality of the packaging and QA process is unparalleled by any free or commercial distribution. In any case, http://www.debian.org/users/ would seem to prove you wrong. In addition, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are among the members of the Debian Partners program (http://www.debian.org/partners/).
For firms opting to be self-supporting through the acquisition of in-house expertise (a path which large corporations, especially, tend to follow) or those who simply don’t need a support contract and thus don’t want to pay for one, Debian is and will remain an ideal solution. And the number of people that fall into this category is *vast*.
For those that *do* want something over and above the excellent, free community support that the distribution provides (the mailing lists, one-on-one contact with the maintainers, irc, etc), a list of consultants is available (http://www.debian.org/consultants/) and a quick google search just turned up at least one company that provide s commercial support for Debian: http://debian.schlittermann.de/ . I’m sure there are loads more out there.
According to Netcraft, Debian is the second most popular server distribution behind RedHat, so I don’t think you could reasonably refer to it as a “little” player (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/16/debian_linux_distribut…).
Here’s the announcement the GCC development team made regarding the issue:
—snip—
It has come to our attention that some GNU/Linux distributions are currently shipping with “GCC 2.96”.
We would like to point out that GCC 2.96 is not a formal GCC release nor will there ever be such a release. Rather, GCC 2.96 has been the code- name for our development branch that will eventually become GCC 3.0.
Current snapshots of GCC, and any version labeled 2.96, produce object files that are not compatible with those produced by either GCC 2.95.2 or the forthcoming GCC 3.0. Therefore, programs built with these snapshots will not be compatible with any official GCC release. Actually, C and Fortran code will probably be compatible, but code in other languages, most notably C++ due to incompatibilities in symbol encoding (“mangling”), the standard library and the
application binary interface (ABI), is likely to fail in some way. Static linking against C++ libraries may make a binary more portable, at the cost of increasing file size and memory use.
To avoid any confusion, we have bumped the version of our current development branch to GCC 2.97.
Please note that both GCC 2.96 and 2.97 are development versions; we do not recommend using them for production purposes. Binaries built using any version of GCC 2.96 or 2.97 will not be portable to systems based on one of our regular releases.
If you encounter a bug in a compiler labeled 2.96, we suggest you contact whoever supplied the compiler as we can not support 2.96 versions that were not issued by the GCC team.
—snip—
Note the “we do not recommend using them for production purposes. Binaries built using any version of GCC 2.96 or 2.97 will not be portable to systems based on one of our regular releases.” and “If you encounter a bug in a compiler labeled 2.96, we suggest you contact whoever supplied the compiler as we can not support 2.96 versions that were not issued by the GCC team.”
To summarise: RedHat went gung-ho and for some reason decided to package unreleased CVS code that the GCC upstream didn’t consider fit for real-world use due to the aforementioned compatibility issues, and (rightly) got flamed for it. It astounds me that their QA didn’t catch this prior to release, but there we are; I guess everyone makes mistakes.
O
“Debian will never be approved by any sane corporation no matter how nice apt-get is.”
Apt can be installed on RedHat http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/
I agree that Linux should be free but if bandwidth isn’t free and your distro is available for as a free download then it’s cheaper than free.
I’m so confused…
Can someone point me short and succinct verbiage on the relationship of all these new products, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, etc. to the old products? All I find on Red Hat’s site is a bunch of marketing speak that makes my colon want to jump out and throttle someone.
What happened between Red Hat 9 and Fedora? What feature differences are there between this, that and the other thing.
Seems I’ve missed something along the way…
“Apt can be installed on RedHat http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/“
True, but AFAIK the RPM format itself has some built-in limitations that prevent the full functionality being ported over to RPM-based distros. The biggest one is that there’s no equivalent for the “suggests”, “recommends” and “replaces” fields which Debian’s packages make extensive use of.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. 🙂
The old products were RedHat Linux and RedHat Enterprise Linux, the former of which was ostensibly aimed at the consumer market and the other aimed (obviously) at the enterprise.
Now, RedHat has effectively discontinued RedHat Linux since it was not viable commercially, but rather than jettison it altogether they have elected instead to open the development process up to the community (or rather, outsource it/hand it over to them).
Prior to the discontinuation of the RedHat consumer product, there was *already* a Fedora project in existence which aimed to create one central, heavily-QA-ed repository for RedHat packages, inspired at least in part by Debian’s model. RedHat then officially embraced the effort and it became the RedHat subproject that it is today.
They’re providing all the necessary infrastructure whilst gradually scaling down the extent of their involvement as volunteers step up to the plate. Eventually they’ll be staying on in pretty much a purely advisory/supervisory capacity, e.g. control of the steering committee and the packaging policy. Their employees will always be there in the background, taking care of the security side of things and generally shoring up any areas which are suffering from lack of community attention. In general, I think the plan is to outsource as much of the actual development work as possible to whoever’s willing to do it, whilst keeping as tight a rein on the project’s direction as they possibly can.
So… the community gets the continued existence of RedHat Linux (albeit under the new name of Fedora Core) so that the old user base isn’t left stranded by the wayside, and in exchange RedHat gets a) to retain its old customer base who would otherwise be forced to switch distributions b) community goodwill and awareness and c) a very low-cost development platform, the fruits of which they can incorporate into future editions of their RedHat Enterprise Linux product.
Redhat bought Cygnus, who created egcs which is now the main gcc tree
Well, I’m a Slacker, wich means I’m a devoted slackware user, but I have great respect for Red Hat because of their involvement in OSS. They are a good company, but because they make some profit people start bashing them, and its unfair. They gave a lot back to the comunity, they did extraordinary contributions to OSS!
A fair point. Just to clarify the slight ambiguity in that statement, though: RedHat acquired Cygnus on November 15th 1999, *after* EGCS replaced the official GCC codebase (in April of that year).
I agree with you, but I think it’s important to remember that there’s also a fairly large group of people who aren’t out to rob RedHat of their fair share of the credit for the contributions that they’ve made, but just get riled when ignoramuses blurt out exaggerated and unfounded over-simplifications such as the “RedHat wrote gcc” view posted earlier in this thread.
Credit where it’s due means not giving too much, just as it means not giving too little.
Cool
Well, I have been a unix Sysadmin and engineer now at a couple of Fortune 500 companies myself.
The real threat that RH does not see is in almost completely losing its small/medium market to players like SuSE and others while concentrating too much on the big player corporation willing to shell out the big bucks for products with Enterprise and Advanced in their titles.
I don’t mind Fedora either. I just feel stuck because there is no broadband in my area and when a major release comes out I can’t go down to Compuseless and buy a boxed version.
As for the Debian comment, I know at least one major player and a few others going for Debian since Debian stable is just that, stable and conservative. This includes a major contracting firms with multiple government contracts running lots of Tomcat servers. I might prefer RH and even suggested to the guy I knew there that Kickstart could simplify their lives. However, I am not blind or religious about my preferences.
pros-and-cons, I read the link. And yes, I see that it was at that time more ISO compliant than any other version. This stands to reason, because it was a development snapshot.
However, I could see Red Hat shipping two compilers rather than just one that was compliant and yet failed to compile GNU/*/Linux software (I am talking out of my ass here, I admit. I never encountered this bug myself, not using Red Hat at all). There are different libstdc++ versions, I know. This is what symlinks are for.
And I do realize that this was a long time ago, and I don’t have a gripe with Red Hat (other than the KDE thing, still not ironed out). I don’t use their distro, but it doesn’t matter.
Also:
While I agree that Debian is the epitome of Free Software, its Free Software Guidelines are what eventually turned into the Open Source Definition. So, Red Hat and Debian have roughly equal criteria. Debian was GNU’s ‘official’ distro for a while, until RMS got angry at them for hosting non-free software on their servers (not included by default, though).
doesnt all this “my distro is greater than yours and you should use mine because it is” defeat the whole purpose of the open source movement, the idea was to give people a choice not to argue about who makes their software the cheapest.
Every time there’s a Red Hat story,instead of just one “Submit comment” button, there should be four: “Submit comment that distribution X is better/worse than Red Hat”; “Talk again about Red Hat’s temporary gcc fork”; “I think Red Hat is the new Microsoft”; and “Submit a comment that’s on topic”. The comments submitted with the first three buttons could automatically be moderated down, and their authors given bad karma (oops, this isn’t Slashdot, but there are so many irrelevant posts it sometimes feels like it).
I am delighted that RHEL 3 has been released. I shall download the source RPMs, which are available from Red Hat mirrors (note that Red Hat is more than fulfilling its obligations under Open Source licenses), and I shall build some or all of them. It will be interesting to compare the packages with Fedora Core 1.0, which is due for release very soon. Well done to everyone who has contributed to either distribution.