Red Hat Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Red Hat Linux | |
| Website | www.redhat.com |
|---|---|
| Company/ developer |
Red Hat |
| OS family | Linux |
| Source model | 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 |
| Working state | Obsolete |
Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux distribution until its discontinuation in 2004.[1]
Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It is 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 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.[2]
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[edit] Features
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.
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.
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
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.[3]
- 1.0 (Mother's Day), 1994-11-03 (Linux 1.2.8)
- 1.1 (Mother's Day+0.1), August 1, 1995 (Linux 1.2.11)
- 2.0, September 20, 1995 (Linux 1.2.13-2)
- 2.1, November 23, 1995 (Linux 1.2.13)
- 3.0.3 (Picasso), May 1, 1996 - first release supporting DEC Alpha
- 4.0 (Colgate), October 3, 1996 (Linux 2.0.18) - first release supporting SPARC
- 4.1 (Vanderbilt), February 3, 1997 (Linux 2.0.27)
- 4.2 (Biltmore), May 19, 1997 (Linux 2.0.30-2)
- 5.0 (Hurricane), December 1, 1997 (Linux 2.0.32-2)
- 5.1 (Manhattan), May 22, 1998 (Linux 2.0.34-0.6)
- 5.2 (Apollo), November 2, 1998 (Linux 2.0.36-0.7)
- 6.0 (Hedwig), April 26, 1999 (Linux 2.2.5-15)
- 6.1 (Cartman), October 4, 1999 (Linux 2.2.12-20)
- 6.2 (Zoot), April 3, 2000 (Linux 2.2.14-5.0)
- 7 (Guinness), September 25, 2000 (this release is labeled "7" not "7.0") (Linux 2.2.16-22)
- 7.1 (Seawolf), April 16, 2001 (Linux 2.4.2-2)
- 7.2 (Enigma), October 22, 2001 (Linux 2.4.7-10, Linux 2.4.9-21smp)
- 7.3 (Valhalla), May 6, 2002 (Linux 2.4.18-3)
- 8.0 (Psyche), September 30, 2002 (Linux 2.4.18-14)
- 9 (Shrike), 2003-03-31 (Linux 2.4.20-8) (this release is labeled "9" not "9.0")
The Fedora and Red Hat Projects merged September 22 2003.[citation needed]
- See Fedora versions
[edit] References
- ^ Free_Versions_of_Red_Hat_Linux_to_be_Discontinued. fusionauthority.com. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
- ^ The Fedora Legacy Project. fedoralegacy.org. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
- ^ The Truth Behind Red Hat/Fedora Names. smoogespace.com. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Fedora Project – History of Red Hat Linux
- Red Hat, Inc. – Linux documentation
- Red Hat Linux at DistroWatch
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