Sundry Red Hat Announcements: Fedora 10 Alpha, RHEL Support Extended

Published: August 19, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has made a bunch of relatively minor but yet important announcements in the recent weeks while The Linux Beacon was on hiatus for summer holiday. These include the first alpha release of the Fedora 10 "Camdridge" development version of Red Hat's Linux, extended full support for RHEL, and IPv6 certification for RHEL 5.2 by the U.S. Department of Defense.

You can read all about the Cambridge release of Fedora in the release notes, but I can give you the high level overview to save you a little time. Fedora 10 will update the RPM package manager to the 4.6 level and rebase the Gnome interface to the 2.24 level and the Eclipse development environment to the 3.4 level. The Fedora Project also says that it will enable ad hoc network sharing in the Linux variant, provide native access to Microsoft Exchange servers using the OpenChange protocol, offer improved Webcam support, introduce a new security audit and intrusion detection system, and add the SugarCRM desktop client to the release.

The Fedora Project is planning to freeze the development on Cambridge this week and put out the beta of the release on September 2. A preview release is scheduled for October 7, with the final Fedora 10 coming to market on October 28. Eventually, the features hammered out in Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 will make their way into the commercialized Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

The RHEL products stand in contrast with Fedora releases in that they have commercial-grade installation and technical support--for a fee, of course--while Fedora is a self-supporting, development release not intended for production except among end users and data centers that have pretty substantial Linux skills or who can live if their computers go ka-plooey when some new code is added to them. A few weeks ago, Red Hat made a minor but still important change to the support lifecycle for its RHEL variants. While Red Hat is not changing its commitment to a seven-year lifecycle of support for RHEL releases and versions, it is extending the "full support" initial phase of tech support from three years to four. This full support phase means that new hardware gets patches so the RHEL release runs and any software enhancements to the Linux stack are woven in; this phase also includes bug fixes for medium, high, or urgent priority levels and security patches for important or critical issues. During the transition phase, which used to run in years four and five, new hardware gets limited support, bug fixes are for high or urgent issues only, and security patches are the same; in the final two years of support, the release is put on maintenance support, which means only critical bug fixes and security patches get added to the release. Red Hat took away one year of transition-level support and upgraded it to full support in making this change. The move means customers who might have had to do upgrades to get support for new hardware now will not have to.

Finally, Red Hat also announced that the U.S. Department of Defense has bestowed its "Special Interoperability Certification" for the IPv6 protocol, which is something that the Defense Information System Agency--think of it as the IT department of the DoD--does, to be specific. The Defense Department wants to transition from IPv4 to IPv6 during the 2008 fiscal year for the Federal government, and now Red Hat 5.2 has been certified as an official IPv6 platform for both workstations and servers and will interoperate with other operating systems and their IPv6 protocols. Such certification is key to getting government contracts for military systems.

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