Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions, and is the most popular in the United States. It is assembled by Red Hat, Inc (listed on Nasdaq as RHAT).

It is one of the "middle-aged" Linux distributions; 1.0 was released in 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 no more than "Red Hat Linux with KDE"), and Yellow Dog Linux (basically "Red Hat Linux with PowerPC support"), ASPLinux (basically "Red Hat Linux with better non-latin characters 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, which is regarded 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 was done by switching the value of "LANG" in /etc/sysconfig/i18n from e.g. "en_US" to "en_US.UTF8". It doesn't have much 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.

It is also shipped with a much critized and much applauded desktop theme[?] called BlueCurve which looks much the same no matter if you're running it under GNOME 2 or KDE.

Multimedia

As of Red Hat Linux 8.0 the operating system ships without MP3-playback abilities due to patent problems.

Version History

• 1.0, November 3, 1994, $49.95
• 1.1, August 1, 1995, $39.95
• 2.0, September 20, 1995
• 2.1, November 23, 1995
• 3.0.3, May 1, 1996 - first release supporting DEC Alpha
• 4.0, October 8, 1996 - first release supporting Sparc
• 4.1, February 3, 1997
• 4.2, May 19, 1997
• 5.0, December 1, 1997
• 5.1, May 22, 1998
• 5.2, November 2, 1998
• 6.0, April 26, 1999
• 6.1, October 4, 1999
• 6.2, April 3, 2000
• 7.0, September 25, 2000
• 7.1, April 16, 2001
• 7.2, October 22, 2001
• 7.3, May 6, 2002
• 8.0, September 30, 2002
• 9, March 31, 2003 (this release is labeled "9" not "9.0")

(Release dates were drawn from announcements made publicly on comp.os.linux.announce.)

See also

• Linux distribution contains alternatives to Red Hat Linux.
• Linux kernel

External Links

• RedHat Linux 9.0 Review (http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review) covers many technical changes and problems in 9.0.