Fedora® 11 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Bible

Appendix C. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Features

With its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) commercial product line, Red Hat, Inc. is clearly positioning itself to go after customers looking to put Linux computing infrastructures in place. So, when you look at the differences between features in Fedora distributions and RHEL products, many features surrounding RHEL products are geared toward managing and deploying multiple desktop and server systems within a large organization.

Despite the fact that Red Hat is aimed primarily at customers who want to build large-scale Linux infrastructures, there are ways of starting with RHEL that require a much smaller investment. Later in this appendix, I describe how to get an evaluation copy of RHEL to try out that you can then upgrade to an affordable subscription program.

The current major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL 5, was released in March 2007 and is now generally available. The latest point release is RHEL 5.3, released in January, 2009. Red Hat is now gearing up for RHEL 5.4 and later RHEL 6, but has not yet announced release dates.

Information about RHEL and related products is available from the Red Hat Web site: http://www.redhat.com/rhel. See Chapter 1 for speculation on which current Fedora features may make their way into RHEL 6.

What's in RHEL 5?

Red Hat, Inc. released RHEL 5 in March, 2007, based on software that was included in Fedora 6. Since RHEL 4, RHEL software product names have changed. Instead of Workstations, Desktops, ...