14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of Open Source solutions, announced yesterday (March 12th) the immediate availability of the first beta version of the eighth update for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 operating systems. Besides the usual bug fixes and software updates (see below for details), this development release is powered by a 2.6.9-82.EL kernel. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Beta is available for 32-bit and AMD/Intel 64-bit architectures.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 is in development and therefore the contents of the beta media kit, the implemented features, and the supported configurations are subject to change before the release of the final product. The supplied beta packages and CD and DVD images are intended for testing purposes only. Remember that this early access software is not supported and is not intended for production environments. Benchmark and performance results cannot be published based on this beta release without explicit approval from Red Hat." - said the Red Hat developers in the official release announcement.
Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Beta:
· The krb5 tools are now PAM enabled; · ipmitool was updated to version 1.8.10; · rpm is now able to archive files larger than 2 GB; · device-mapper was updated to version 1.02.28; · The dm_hp_sw handler for HP Storage Arrays in device-mapper-multipath was updated; · The mpath_prio_ontap error handling module in device-mapper-multipath was improved; · IPv6 support was added to iscsi-initiator-utils; · Router solicitation support was added; · OFED was updated to version 1.4; · virtio drivers were added in order to support KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) hypervisor environments; · AMD/ATI HDMI audio support was added; · Support for affected_cpus in cpufreq was added; · usbfs_mutex was backported in usbfs; · The i8042 polling timer was removed; · The pmtimer for the ASUS A8V motherboard was fixed; it is now properly detected; · The ALSA HDA Intel driver was updated; · Many other kernel improvements.
For a complete list with all the changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Beta, please visit the official changelog.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution is somehow targeted more to the commercial market, including mainframes, which enjoy a 7-year support on Red Hat's behalf after its release. New versions of RHEL are released quite fast and thus, users can upgrade their current version to the newest release free of charge. Red Hat distributed four versions of RHEL: RHEL AS (Advanced Server), RHEL ES (edge, economy or entry-level server), RHEL WS (workstation) and Red Hat Desktop.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Beta ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service.