Red Hat Linux

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 Mandrake 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).

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. With version 8.0, RedHat 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 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default font encoding for the system. This has little effect on English-speaking users, but when using the upper part of the ISO 8859-1 character set, characters are radically different encoded compared to the old way. This has been seen by e.g. French or Swedish-speaking users as an aggressive move, because their old filesystems look very different and might be unusable afterwards. This change can be undone by removing the ".UTF-8" part of the "LANG" setting.

The distribution also shipped with a controversial desktop theme called BlueCurve, intended to look the same under GNOME and KDE. However, the alterations to KDE were sufficiently severe as to cause developer Bernhard Rosenkraenzer to quit the company. [1]

Red Hat Linux 8.0 and 9 are without MP3-playback abilities due to possible patent problems. Instead, Red Hat promotes the use of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format. MP3 support can be installed afterwards.

Fedora

Main article: Fedora Linux

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 Core project. The new plan is to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora Linux (alias Fedora Core) 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.

Version history

Release dates drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce.

• 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
• 7.0 (Guinness), September 25 2000
• 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), was published November 2003.

External links

• The Fedora Project, Fedora Core Linux downloads.
• Review of RedHat Linux 9
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• History of Red Hat Linux

Referenced By