Red Hat Unwraps Beta of Next Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Tuesday unleashed the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, code-named Taroon.

Once ready for general release, Taroon will supercede Red Hat’s current Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 product line. The Enterprise Linux line is rooted
in Red Hat Advanced Server, which the firm rolled
out in March 2002.

Since that time, Advanced Server has spread its wings and tiered
into three variants: Enterprise Linux AS (formerly Advanced Server, geared
for large departmental and datacenter servers), Enterprise Linux ES
(designed for entry-level and departmental server applications), and
Enterprise Linux WS (the workstation/desktop environment, geared for
client-server deployments, software development environments and targeted
ISV client applications).

Now, the Enterprise Linux line has become Red Hat’s core operating system,
allowing it to take a large stake in the market for mission-critical
enterprise computing. The company’s original operating system, Red Hat
Linux, continues to get updates
, but is now geared mainly to hobbyists.

The Taroon beta is currently available in two variants: Enterprise Linux AS
and Enterprise Linux WS. Red Hat noted that Enterprise Linux ES has an
identical package set to Enterprise Linux AS in Beta 1, and users
interested in the ES product should test the AS Beta 1 release.

The AS beta release includes the core operating system and network server
packages. It is available for a number of architectures, including:
i686/Athlon 32-bit, Intel Itanium2 64-bit, AMD64 64-bit, IBM iSeries and
pSeries 64-bit, IBM S/390 31-bit, and IBM zSeries 64-bit.

The WS beta release includes the core operating system and desktop
productivity, development, communications and network client packages. It
is available for the i686/Athlon 32-bit, Intel Itanium2 64-bit, and AMD64
64-bit architectures.

The beta includes a host of new features. It comes with the 2.4.21 Linux
kernel, and a number of scalability enhancements, like Native Posix
Threading Library (NPTL), Thread Local Storage and Futex APIs, per-device
locks for block IO, and a hyperthreading scheduler.

Other enhancements improve memory management, the development environment,
the I/O subsystem, the desktop, serviceability, networking, security and
cluster management.