Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux was one of the most popular Linux distributions, assembled by Red Hat.

It is one of the "middle-aged" Linux distributions; 1.0 was released in November 3, 1994. It is not as old as Slackware, but certainly older than many other distributions. It was the first Linux distribution to use RPM as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as the desktop-oriented Mandriva Linux (originally Red Hat Linux with KDE), Yellow Dog Linux (which started from Red Hat Linux with PowerPC support), and ASPLinux (Red Hat Linux with better non-Latin character support).

Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although the Fedora Legacy project continues to publish updates.

Market

Red Hat Linux is marketed primarily as a server operating system. It is also popular among companies running computing farms and the like as the built-in installation scripting tool "kickstart" enables fast configuring and set up of standardized hardware. From version 8.0, Red Hat has also targeted the corporate desktop.

Special characteristics

Red Hat Linux is installed with a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices. It also has a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.

As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This has little effect on English-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic, bi-directional and complex script languages along with European languages. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users, whose legacy ISO-8859-based setups the change broke.

Version 8.0 was also the first to include the Bluecurve desktop theme.

Red Hat Linux lacks many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support is disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommends using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, can be installed afterwards, although royalties are required in the United States. NTFS support is also missing, but can be freely installed as well.

Fedora Core

Red Hat Linux was originally developed exclusively inside Red Hat, with the only feedback from users coming through bug reports and contributions to the included software packages — not contributions to the distribution as such. This was changed late in 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged with the community-based Fedora Linux project. The new plan is to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora Core (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Fedora Linux) replaces the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to the relationship between Netscape Communicator and Mozilla, or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully free software.

Nomenclature

The official name of the Red Hat Linux distribution is Red Hat Linux (often abbreviated to RHL). This name is a conjunction of two words. The first word Red Hat is that of the Red Hat software company. The second word Linux refers to the underlying Linux kernel written by Linus Torvalds. RedHat, Redhat, RH, Redhat linux, RedHat linux, Redhat Linux, RedHat Linux are common, unofficial names for the software and are discouraged from use.

Some CD vendors offering Red Hat Linux call Red Hat Linux by other names in their advertising or catalogues because of the conditions placed over the trademark for Red Hat Linux. For example, Lankum.com calls it You-Know-Who and LinuxCD.org calls it Blue Jacket.

Red Hat's trademark information page says that it does not want confusion to arise as a result of CD vendors using the Red Hat Linux name on redistributed copies of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Linux, the official product, comes with technical support, and Red Hat does not want consumers to be mislead into thinking that Red Hat Linux CDs purchased from other vendors, is the same product as the official, i.e. that comes with support.

Version history

Release dates drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce. Version names are chosen as to be cognitively related to the previous release, yet not related in the same way as the release before that. ^*

1.0 (Mother's Day), November 3 1994, $49.95
1.1 (Mother's Day+0.1), August 1 1995, $39.95
2.0, September 20 1995
2.1, November 23 1995
3.0.3 (Picasso), May 1 1996 - first release supporting DEC Alpha
4.0 (Colgate), October 8 1996 - first release supporting Sparc
4.1 (Vanderbilt), February 3 1997
4.2 (Biltmore), May 19 1997
5.0 (Hurricane), December 1 1997
5.1 (Manhattan), May 22 1998
5.2 (Apollo), November 2 1998
6.0 (Hedwig), April 26 1999
6.1 (Cartman), October 4 1999
6.2 (Zoot), April 3 2000
7 (Guinness), September 25 2000 (this release is labeled "7" not "7.0")
7.1 (Seawolf), April 16 2001
7.2 (Enigma), October 22 2001
7.3 (Valhalla), May 6 2002
8.0 (Psyche), September 30 2002
9 (Shrike), March 31 2003 (this release is labeled "9" not "9.0")

The Fedora and Red Hat Projects merged September 22 2003.

Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow), November 6 2003
Fedora Core 2 (Tettnang), May 18 2004
Fedora Core 3 (Heidelberg), November 8 2004
Fedora Core 4 (Stentz), June 13, 2005
Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux), March 20, 2006

External links

Linux distributions | Red Hat