14 DAY TRIAL // The Red Hat team proudly announces the beta release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 version. As a beta release it is currently available mostly for testing purposes and there are a lot of beta packages which would be definitely changed in the stable version.
The RHEL 5.1 beta is said to be available for all x86/x86_64, ppc. S390x and ia64 architectures. According to the release announcement, the testing period for this version will go on until September 2007 and by then, no benchmark or performance tests should be taken on this version. It seems that the release focused more on bringing numerous improvements and updates in many areas, such as the virtualization area, networking, security or storage while the bugs and malfunctions have been left aside for further correction.
Highlights:
- improved and complete virtualization support on Itanium2 platforms - improved support for HV guests - update of the libvirt management layer - improved ACPI power management support including support for S3 suspend to RAM and S4 hibernate - added Kexec/Kdump support for the host in a virtualized environment - Samba update for improved interoperability - smartcard support for SSH - AM/Kerberos and NSS-LDAP updates for improved integration in Active Directory environment - significant stability improvements to the GFS2 file system - added replication and migration support for NFSv4 referrals - update of the Sata sub-system
The release announcement features a series of already known bugs and malfunctions, of which the Red Hat developers would take care as soon as possible but many other such bugs are expected to be found during this testing period. The users and developers who chose to take part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 beta program and find more bugs in this version should report the bugs through Red Hat's Bugzilla.
You can download Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 beta now from Softpedia