This is probably the last maintenance release of RHEL 5

Jan 8, 2013 22:11 GMT  ·  By

On January 8, Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, proudly announced the immediate availability for the ninth update for their powerful and still supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 is a maintenance release, fixing lots of annoying bugs from previous release, and bringing new features and various enhancements in various areas, keeping the enterprise platform stable and reliable.

As usual, backwards compatibility with existing software and hardware platforms supported by previous RHEL 5 releases is still available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, which respects its promise of a 10-year lifecycle.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9:

· Support for industry-leading hardware vendors, including some of the latest chipset, CPU and device driver enhancements; · Tighter security controls; · Ability to check and verify the robustness of new passwords; · Support for the latest government password policy requirements; · FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) mode can now be used with dmraid root devices; · Added support for RAID device discovery, as well as RAID set activation to FIPS mode; · OpenJDK 7; · SystemTap improvements; · Improved IPv6 support; · Updated rsyslog to version 5; · Updated Samba to version 3.6; · Added Microsoft Hyper-V drivers; · Better subscription management.

“Our goal with each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is always to provide a highly flexible and extendable platform that continues to grow with the evolving needs of our customers, while allowing them to migrate to the next major release in their own timeframe,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Red Hat's Platform Business Unit, in the press release.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 is the perfect example of our commitment to providing customers with an extensive product lifecycle, one that strives to provide continued, unwavering support for today's technologies and business needs.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service.