Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 hits Beta as RHEL 6 looms

From the

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Where is RHEL 6?

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Red Hat today announced the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 — on the eve of a major Red Hat event in San Francisco, where we could be hearing about the release of RHEL 6.

But first we’ve got RHEL 5.6 (beta) today, providing some updated apps.

Red Hat’s release notes are a little sparse, but the key new items are: BIND 9.7 providing improved DNSsec support and PHP 5.3.

Yeaah, I know, shocking that PHP 5.3 which was released more than a year ago is listed as a ‘new’ feature.

Other new items include:   ebtables  an Ethernet layer firewall,
dropwatch network stack packet analysis and   sssd offline credential caching.

So no, this is not the big update the RHEL 5.4 was, which provided KVM as the new default virtualization tech for Red Hat. The RHEL 5.5 update was mostly about hardware enablement.

The BIG DEAL of course is RHEL 6 which I think is going to be announced any day now (maybe tomorrow even). With RHEL 6, Red Hat will debut it’s first major update since RHEL 5 in 2007.