From the ‘Teaching an old dog new tricks’ files:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 (RHEL) became generally available today. The RHEL 5.9 release first landed in beta in late September and is mostly about new hardware enablement.
It’s also an important release in that RHEL 5.9 is the last minor release in the first Production phase of RHEL. Red Hat has three production phases for its enterprise Linux releases. The first phase is the one where new features are added, meaning that RHEL 5.9 is likely to be the last point release of the RHEL 5.x platform to get new features.
So what are the new features in RHEL 5.9?
When I spoke with Ron Pacheco, Senior Director of Product Management at Red Hat, in 2012 about RHEL 5.9 he told me that the release was including SystemTap. SystemTap is s Linux tool for monitoring information about a system.
While RHEL 5.x now enters its second phase of production, RHEL 6.x will continue to push forward. RHEL 6.4 entered Beta in December and is set to become generally available in the coming weeks.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.