Those that have been eager to get a taste of Red Hat’s
next version of Enterprise Linux now have their chance.
Red Hat’s community of enterprise users is now testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Beta 1, code-named Tikanga.
Though some had expected the first beta of RHEL 5 sooner, a Red Hat spokesperson told internetnews.com that it is progressing well according to schedule and they’re pleased to now release a public beta.
RHEL 5 will be the first major version update to Red Hat’s flagship distribution since February 2005.
But that doesn’t mean Red Hat and its distributions have been stagnant this whole time.
The company has released four incremental RHEL 4 updates, the most recent of which was last month.
Red Hat’s Fedora Core community Linux distribution has gone through several version updates since RHEL 4 was first released and is now on the verge of its Fedora Core 6 release in early October.
According to Red Hat, the development of RHEL 5 is closely aligned with Fedora Core 6 and the upstream community.
Among the key new features in RHEL 5 is the inclusion of Xen Virtualization, which is one of the main release drivers.
Xen has appeared in Fedora Core since version four and has since improved in subsequent releases to ensure better integration.
For its Red
Hat Enterprise debut, Red Hat has put its Xen implementation through
extensive testing and hardening in order to ensure what they hope will be
reliable enterprise production deployment.
Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 already ships with Xen.
Beyond just virtualization, RHEL 5 will also improve upon SELinux as well as
clustering, network storage and smartcard integration.
The new release, though, doesn’t necessarily answer all users’ needs or wants.
One Red Hat user noted in a beta mailing-list posting, that they were
disappointed not to find integrated support for the ReiserFS and XFS file
systems in RHEL5.
The post yield a few replies from other Red Hat users,
most of them in support of Red Hat’s decision not to include reiserfs and
XFS and instead just to stick with the default ext3 filesystem.
“At this time ext3 is as good as XFS and ReiserFS are,” Milan Kerslager
wrote. “So this is worthless to have two similar FS in the kernel and do
double work in-house to support both FS to satisfy a minority part of
customers.”
A release candidate is scheduled for a late fall release, with the official launch set for early winter.