What s Coming in RHEL5?

What's Coming in RHEL5?

If you are using RHEL4, you will find that a lot of new features have been added to the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release over the nearly two years since RHEL4 came out. If RHEL5 is still not available by the time you read this, look to download a Beta copy of RHEL5 that you can try out from here:

 ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/RHEL5-Beta1 

Once RHEL5 has been released, you can get information you need on the product by going to www.redhat.com/rhel . Because most of the software that goes into RHEL5 was developed for Fedora Core, using this book and associated software (which covers Fedora 6) will teach you a lot about what is in RHEL5. Here are some features to look for in RHEL5:

• Products - The software product names have changed. Instead of Workstations, Desktops, Enterprise servers, and Application servers, there are two main categories: Servers and Clients. Subsets of those categories on the server side include storage, cluster, and virtualization servers. For desktop systems, there are Workstation, Desktop, and virtualization systems.

• Installation - Using yum instead of the up2date facility used in RHEL4, the RHEL installer (anaconda) has a lot more flexibility in installing options. In particular, you can use multiple online software repositories during installation, and there are graphical utilities for installing software after initial installation.

• New Technologies - Stateless Linux, used to provide system provisioning and management, is available for the first time in RHEL5. Greatly improved SELinux features are included with RHEL5 as well. Xen is also added to RHEL5.

• Latest Software Packages - Major enhancements to the kernel, server software, and desktop applications over the past few years have made their way to RHEL5.

As Red Hat, Inc. has steered the direction of the Fedora Project, it been able to test the applications destined for RHEL, work on performance improvements, and shake out tons of bugs . If the quality of Fedora 6 is any indication, you can expect RHEL5 to offer the same level of stability and performance that it showed in previous releases.