14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of Open Source solutions, announced yesterday, January 20th, the immediate availability of the third update for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system. Besides the usual bug fixes and software updates, the most important features brought by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 are: better virtualization performance for the 64-bit architectures, support for the new Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors and the inclusion of the OpenJDK next-generation Java technology.
"Further strengthening our long-standing relationship with Red Hat, we have collaborated to make the newly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 operating platform run great on Intel Xeon processor-based platforms," said Doug Fisher, vice president of the Intel Software and Services Group, and general manager of the Systems Software Division in the press release. "Together, the compelling combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Intel's current and future Intel Xeon processor-based servers enable customers to run the most demanding, business-critical workloads on high-performance, cost-effective, reliable platforms."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 updates various packages, such as audit 1.7.7, wpa_supplicant 0.5.10, NetworkManager 0.7.0, dbus-glib 0.73.8 or sudo 1.6.9; and drivers, such as scsi_dh, scsi-target-utils and MPT Fusion.
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. Existing RHEL customers will be able to download the updated ISO images or the updates from the Red Hat Networks website. New RHEL users can download a 30-day trial edition from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Evaluation Program website, after registering.
"With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, Red Hat has once again delivered a rich set of features, developed through rapid innovation with the open source community, that can increase the capability and drive down the cost of customers' Information Technology," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. "With the challenge to carve costs out of IT budgets, the flexibility, reliability and simplicity of an Enterprise Linux subscription has more value to customers than ever. Our customers have access to all the features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 today."