Red Hat Linux

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"RHL" redirects here. For other uses, see RHL (disambiguation).
Red Hat Linux
Company / developer Red Hat
OS family Unix-like
Working state Obsolete
Source model Free Software / Open source
Initial release May 13, 1995
Latest stable release 9 alias Shrike / March 31, 2003 (aged 7)
Package manager RPM Package Manager
Kernel type Monolithic kernel
License Various
Website www.redhat.com

Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.[1]

Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called "Red Hat Commercial Linux"[2] It is the first Linux distribution to use the packaging system, the RPM Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.

Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for the home environment. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on 2004-04-30, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007.[3]

Contents

[edit] Features

Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support Executable and Linkable Format instead of the older a.out format.[4]

Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.

In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc 2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel.[5]

Versions 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called "2.96".[6] The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95's bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha[7]. Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++ standard, which caused much of the existing code not to compile.

In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, ie. from Linus Torvalds'[8] and The GCC Steering Committee[9]; Red Hat was forced to defend their decision.[10] GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI with other compilers. The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called "kgcc".

As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This had 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 were broken by the change[citation needed].

Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme. It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE.[11]

Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.[12]

Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties are required everywhere MP3 is patented.[citation needed] Support for Microsoft's NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.

[edit] Fedora

Main article: Fedora (operating system)

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 in late 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged with the community-based Fedora Project. The new plan is to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora replaces the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version.[citation needed] 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.

[edit] 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.[citation needed]

Red Hat's trademark information page states that it is necessary to avoid confusion with redistributed copies which, unlike the official version from Red Hat, come with no support.[citation needed] Partly as a result of this, some CD vendors offering Red Hat Linux call it by other names. For example, Lankum.com calls it "You-Know-Who" and LinuxCD.org calls it "Blue Jacket".

[edit] Version history

Release dates drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce. Version names are chosen as to be cognitively related to the prior release, yet not related in the same way as the release before that.[13]

The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22, 2003. [14]

[edit] See also

Free software portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Free_Versions_of_Red_Hat_Linux_to_be_Discontinued". fusionauthority.com. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
  2. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.announce/browse_thread/thread/3a9b67e29a9616cc/25f1a331d8f04e84
  3. ^ "The Fedora Legacy Project". fedoralegacy.org. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
  4. ^ Linux Distributions Compared, LinuxJournal, 1996
  5. ^ The Truth Behind Red Hat/Fedora Names
  6. ^ LWN - Distributions
  7. ^ a/rh-tools
  8. ^ Linux Today - Linus Weighs in on Red Hat 7 Compiler Issues
  9. ^ Gerald Pfeifer - GCC 2.96
  10. ^ [http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/12/163218&mode=thread An Open Letter From Bob Young], Slashdot.org, Thu Oct 12, 2000 12:52 PM
  11. ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/09/17/red_hat_nullifies_kde_gnome/
  12. ^ Red Hat Linux 9 Release Notes
  13. ^ "The Truth Behind Red Hat/Fedora Names". smoogespace.com. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
  14. ^ "Fedora and Red Hat to Merge". Retrieved on 2008-08-02.

[edit] External links

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