14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, proudly announced on November 10th the immediate availability of the final and stable version of the powerful Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system.
The announcement comes right after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Beta, on November 9th. This highly anticipated release of RHEL 6 includes lots of improvements and it is available for the i386, AMD64/Intel64, System z, and IBM Power (64-bit) architectures.
However, Red Hat announced that with this release it will not provide support for the Intel Itanium architecture. Also, POWER5 processors are no longer supported, only POWER6 or higher CPUs.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux has for years been the mission-critical platform of choice for many enterprise companies. Customers such as British Airways, Citi and NTT Communications have become trusted partners in the development of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform."
"We are now entering an era of enterprise computing where flexibility, portability and interoperability are more important than ever. And today, we are delivering the platform that customers need. This has always been our focus."
"What we are delivering is more open, more reliable and more comprehensive than other products on the market. The future is here with a platform designed to take customers into the next generation with virtualization and cloud." - said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat, in the press release.
Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6:
· Improved graphical installer; · Support for new filesystems (EXT4, XFS, NFS, block discard); · LVM enhancements; · Better power management with powertop and tuned; · Improved PackageKit and Yum package managers; · Better support for clustering, with the Corosync Cluster Engine; · Enhanced security; · Network packet labeling and support for IPv6; · Suspend and resume functionality; · Support for multiple displays; · Nouveau video driver for Nvidia graphics cards; · Internationalization support; · KDE SC 4.3; · OpenOffice.org Office Suite 3.1; · Mozilla Thunderbird 3; · Mozilla Firefox 3.5; · Apache 2.2.15; · MySQL 5.1; · PostgreSQL 8.4; · Better documentation; · Enhanced C++ support; · Samba enhancements; · Full support for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine); · Alternative PHP Cache (APC) support for PHP; · Added memcached.
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 6 Beta ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service.