14 DAY TRIAL // The latest update to the long running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been released. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 comes with plenty of updates including a brand new Linux kernel build as well as new versions of many of the main packages.
After a couple of months in testing, the first beta release came in November 2010, the latest stability update to the current supported branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is ready for a wider release.
"Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, release 5.6 (with kernel-2.6.18-238.el5) for a family of products," Red Hat wrote in the official release announcement.
The latest RHEL release comes with enhanced driver support. Several drivers, for network adapters, RAID controllers and other drivers are included and supported from the installer.
RHEL 5.6 comes with several updates in the virtualization department as well. Libvirt has been upgraded to version 0.8.2.
"Para-virtualized drivers (the virtio drivers) increase the performance for a virtual machine's block and network devices," the release notes read.
EXT 4 is now fully supported in RHEL 5.6 meaning that you can read, write, create and modify EXT 4 file systems. The e4fsprogs utilities have been included in the new release as well. RHEL 5.6 also comes with full support for logical volume manager (LVM).
You can check out the full release notes for details on all updates, changes and fixes. You can check out the technical notes as well for details on all updated packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6.
As per usual, the ISOs as well as any binaries for the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 are available through the Red Hat Network.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service.