Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Beta Available for Download

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced on November 9th the immediate availability of the first beta version of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 operating system.

Besides the usual updates, improvements or bugfixes, this first development release of RHEL 5.6 is powered by a 2.6.18-229.el5 kernel, and it is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

"The Beta Release Notes are available on the media as well as online as part of the general documentation. The online version of the Beta Release Notes will contain the latest data. The Beta Technical Notes are only available online. Please see the Documentation section in this announcement for locating the online Release Notes and Technical Notes." - was stated in the official release announcement.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Beta:

· Updated Linux kernel to version 2.6.18-229.el5;
· Updated Bind 9.7 for better support for DNSsec;
· Updated PHP 5.3, which includes support for namespaces;
· Added ebtables, an Ethernet layer firewall;
· Added dropwatch, a network stack packet analysis software;
· Added IPA fonts to support Japan JIS X 0213:2004;
· Added sssd, an offline credential caching tool.

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 5.6 Beta ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service. In order to test this development release, Red Hat recommends that you do a clean install!