Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta Is Here

Red Hat has announced the availability of the first beta of its flagship product. With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 Beta, one of the most popular Linux offerings for the business environment is getting a significant update affecting all major areas and components. RHEL 6 will be the first major release since 2007, when RHEL 5 came out.

“We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today’s Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners and members of the public to install, test and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date,” the official announcement read.

With so much time between releases, it’s understandable that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta comes with a big number of improvements and updates. RHEL 6 Beta is optimized for efficient computing. Several power-management features have been implemented, enabling the system to use up as few resources as possible.

The tickless kernel, which is being introduced, enables the CPU to enter an idle state more frequently and tools like Powertop and Tuned enable administrators to keep energy consumption down. But performance hasn’t been sacrificed, RHEL 6 Beta should be faster and more efficient, especially on multi-core systems.

RHEL 6 Beta also comes with a revamped networking stack, including support for IPv6 and better wireless networking. Scalability was another focus, RHEL 6 was designed to be much more future-proof in both virtual and ‘bare metal’ deployments. And with virtualization becoming increasingly popular, it was also a big focus for RHEL 6. It builds on the existing KVM capabilities of RHEL 5 with improved performance and hardware support.

On the desktop front, RHEL 6 Beta comes with both GNOME and KDE as default options. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is included, as well as the recent Mozilla Thunderbird 3. RHEL 6 Beta comes with OpenOffice.org 3.1. As an alternative to GNOME, KDE 4.3 is also available.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is available for download here.