Red Hat has announced the availability of the second beta of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which includes many improvements and bug fixes over the first beta:

"Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2 (kernel 2.6.18-1.2747.el5). Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2 is a preview of the next generation of Red Hat's comprehensive suite of enterprise operating systems and products, designed for mission-critical enterprise computing and certified by top enterprise hardware and software vendors."

Focus areas for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2 testing include the following:

• Virtualization (Para/full, 32/64-bit x86, libvirt, virt-manager)
• SELinux MLS support (EAL4+ / LSPP)
• SELinux Troubleshooter (Greatly simplifies administration)
• File Integrity Checking (aide)
• Audit (Powerful new search / reporting tools; unique real time interface)
• Network storage (Autofs, FS-Cache (Tech Preview; see below) / NFS persistent local cache, NFSv4, iSCSI)
• Integrated directory & security (Smart card login with PKI / Kerberos authentication)
• Desktop (GNOME, X.Org 7.1, Laptop support features)
• Stateless Linux (Desktop / Server / Virtualized / Infrastructure (Tech Preview; see below)
• New Driver Update Program (Improved delivery for supported drivers and for new drivers (including 3rd party drivers))
• Enhanced development tools (Systemtap, Frysk) (Tech Preview; see below)
• Enhanced large SMP support (Big kernel lock removal, etc.)
• Multi-Core Support (Quad core processor support)
• Single Node / Guest GFS2 (Tech Preview; see below)
• Kexec / Kdump (Replacing Diskdump and Netdump)
• Installer improvements
• Enhanced IPv6 support (Conformance improvements, IPv6-Ready Phase 2
• Targeted, Multiple routing tables, and robustness and performance improvements)
• IPSEC enhancements
• I/OAT, IPv4 / IPv6 fragmentation offload & optimized buffer management
• Improved ACPI support, suspend to disk
• Block device data encryption support
• Root device MPIO support
• Dynamically switchable per-queue I/O schedulers
• Enhanced pipe buffering (Circular buffers)
• Integrated multi-media support (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora; other formats TBD in final product)
• Enhanced plug and play hardware support (Cameras, etc.)
• Enhanced graphics using AIGLX/Compiz (e.g. Fading, transparency, etc.) (Tech Preview; see below)
• Network Manager (Automatic network configuration)
• Samba (Improved Microsoft (tm) Active Directory integration)
• Yum/Pup updater for RHN
• New Clustering infrastructure, Distributed Lock Manager (Single node / Guest)
• Broad range of new HW support.

You can read the full release announcement here.

Unfortunately, this release is only available to the subscribers of Red Hat Networks.