Red Hat Releases RHEL 4 Public Beta

The announcement couldn't have been hidden more carefully. Unlike "Taroon", the previous public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the first beta or RHEL 4, code name "Nahant", was not announced on Red Hat Watch mailing list, nor was it mentioned anywhere on Red Hat's web site. In fact, the only place the announcement was sent to was the just established Nahant Beta List, which couldn't have had many subscribers other than a handful of RHEL developers. But whatever the reason for this secrecy, the fact is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 has now officially entered a public beta testing phase. We downloaded the 4 ISO image set of RHEL Enterprise Server to take an early look.

First some general information. RHEL 4 is being developed in parallel with Fedora Core 3, which has been in beta testing since July. Some would have expected RHEL 4 to be based on the earlier and well-established Fedora Core 2, but remember that Fedora 3 will be released early in November this year, while RHEL 4 final is not expected until perhaps April or May next year. This will give Red Hat developers an extra 5 - 6 months to finalize the product and to iron out any outstanding bugs not caught during the Fedora Core 3 beta testing period.

The platform support and product range has changed little since RHEL 3, the only exception being the low-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, which, in addition to i386, is now also built for ia64 and x86_64 architectures. Here is a quick summary of what is available for each hardware platform:

• i386: Advanced Server, Desktop, Enterprise Server, Workstation
• ia64: Advanced Server, Enterprise Server, Workstation
• ppc: Advanced Server
• s390: Advanced Server
• s390x: Advanced Server
• x86_64: Advanced Server, Desktop, Enterprise Server, Workstation

Besides platform support and price, the main difference between RHEL Enterprise Server (ES) and RHEL Advanced Server (AS) is in their respective target systems. RHEL ES is designed for small and medium size businesses using systems with up to two CPUs and 8 GB of memory; in contrast, RHEL AS is intended for large departmental and data center servers with up to 16 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM. On the client side, there is little difference between RHEL Desktop and RHEL WS from a technical point of view and packages included, but RHEL Desktop is sold as a package of either 10 or 50 units with management modules for mass deployments, while RHEL Workstation can be purchased as a stand-alone product.

Apart from an extra Red Hat Network account screen during the post-install configuration, installing RHEL 4 doesn't differ much from installing any recent test build of Fedora Core 3. A subscription to Red Hat Network is, of course, an integral part of any RHEL product, providing updates and errata for the duration of the subscription period. RHEL 3 users will also note a new option to select one of the three SELinux states. The default is "Active", which enforces all policies, such as denying unauthorized users access to certain files and programs. On the other end of the spectrum is a self-explanatory "Disabled" state. The third state, "Warn", means that SELinux policies are turned on but not enforced, with a log file providing details of any access violations. This is a good way of testing SELinux, especially designed for those users who would eventually like to enable the policies, but are somewhat nervous about possible negative effects on their system operation.

Like SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9, the default installation of RHEL 4 is a full graphical system. Beta 1 comes with a preview release of GNOME 2.8 as the default desktop environment (KDE 3.3.0 is also included). Although it is possible to install a text-only system by deselecting the GNOME package set during installation, having a graphical system will benefit less experienced system administrators who would appreciate the many graphical utilities for painless configuration of Apache, Samba, NFS and other server applications, as well as an easy setup of the Red Hat Network update service. An interesting new feature (courtesy of GNOME 2.8) is the configurable Keyring Manager daemon for managing passwords. As an example, it allows users to keep administrative privileges after configuring the first module that requires root password - when done, a key set icon will appear in the system tray to indicate that the user will not need to enter root password again during the next 5 minutes (default).

Besides the newly included SELinux functionality, users familiar with RHEL 3 will notice several other changes. Red Hat has now moved to Linux kernel 2.6 (2.6.8 to be exact), XFree86 has been replaced with X.Org (version 6.8.0), CVS with Subversion (1.0.6), UW IMAP with Cyrus IMAP (2.2.6) and OSS sound modules with ALSA (1.0.6). The package supplying Linux Volume Manager (now developed by Red Hat after acquiring Sistina earlier this year) is now called lvm2 (version 2.00.21) and it comes with many new features and commands. Users of Asian languages will be pleased to know that all of the various input method servers are now been deprecated in favor of IIIMF (Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework), a multilingual Unicode input framework which enables easy switching between languages, input methods and character sets, and it even allows for mixing different character sets in documents. Additionally, support for several Indic languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil, is now available in the Anaconda installer and throughout most GTK+ applications.

Overall, the list of newly added features in this beta release of RHEL 4 is impressive. What is needed now is intensive testing on all architectures to determine the capabilities and stability of the 2.6 kernel under extreme conditions. Then some 6 months down the road, when all the known bugs have been ironed out, RHEL 4 will undoubtedly provide enough reasons for many system administrators and IT decision makers to upgrade, deploy or migrate.

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