14 DAY TRIAL // The second update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released yesterday, and it came with a large set of bugfixes, improved hardware support capabilities and some brand new software that was backported from upstream open source projects to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 brings you better virtualization support for large system configurations, including support for NUMA-based architectures. This release can support 64 CPUs and a maximum of 512GB per system. Now, the number of network interfaces is no longer limited to just three, which increases the scalability of your system.
On the desktop side, you will get Evolution 2.12.3, OpenOffice 2.3.0, the latest Beta release of Firefox 3 and Thunderbird 2.0. The laptop support was greatly improved, with enhancements for the Suspend, Hibernate and Resume functions. Most of the graphics drivers were updated, and the "intel" video driver was backported, because of its popularity on desktop computers and laptops.
New asynchronous kernel crypto hardware driver APIs were included in the upstream Linux kernel and backported into RHEL 5.2, to increase the system security. To comply with the corporate and governmental security standards, the SHA-256 / SHA-512 password encryption support and RFC4303 compliant auditing support were added.
Red Hat Cluster Suite, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform, will now bring you a Resource Event Scripting Language for complex software "warm stand-byes". The improved iSCSI support will allow you to set-up diskless systems with a root volume on the iSCSI server, a feature that is more than necessary in high-density blade environments.
The developers added OpenSwan, which will enable RHEL 5.2 to support IKE (Internet Key Exchange) 2 for IPv6. OpenSwan is an IPSec implementation for the Linux kernels 2.0, 2.2. 2.4 and 2.6, running on platforms like x86, x86_64, ARM and IA64.