Distributions

The Significance of Red Hat Linux 9

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

The announcement from Red Hat about the upcoming release of Red Hat Linux 9 has caught many by surprise. In the past, Red Hat, Inc has stubbornly refused to pre-announce any release, whether final or development, giving all who inquired the usual "released when ready" talk. The version number was also unexpected as many had thought that this release would be labeled 8.1 rather than 9.

At first glance these changes might seem insignificant. But a closer look reveals that there are reasons why they come into effect at this point in time and some of these changes will have substantial impact on enterprises.

Firstly, let's look at the significance of that "9". Of all Linux distributions out there, Red Hat is the only one that maintains a technically and logically justified versioning scheme, as opposed to a scheme driven by marketing. Historically, Red Hat only increased the major version number if the new release broke binary compatibility with the previous one. The binary compatibility was, to a large extent, defined by the the glibc library and if we look at the last few years' worth of releases, we will see that Red Hat 6 series shipped with glibc 2.1.x, Red Hat 7 series with glibc 2.2.x and Red Hat 8.0 with a pre-release version of glibc 2.3.

Red Hat 9 will ship with glibc 2.3.2. However, there is something else that breaks the binary compatibility in this case and that something is called NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library). What is NPTL? A comprehensive white paper (in PDF format) explains all the technical details, but in layman's terms, NPTL is a much improved new library for threading of processes which takes into account capabilities of modern processors. This library, developed by Red Hat, is designed to replace the existing library written back in 1996. (See also LWN's coverage of NTPL from last September).

As a result of introducing NPTL, many applications compatible with previous Red Hat releases will no longer work on Red Hat Linux 9. Some of the implications are explained in this mailing list post. The poster (Red Hat's Matt Wilson) also points out another interesting fact: the Enterprise Linux series of products has freed the company to put newer technology into the base "Red Hat Linux" distribution. Red Hat Linux is starting to look like the final proving ground before software moves into the (more stable) Enterprise distributions.

Also note the missing ".0" from the version number. This has possibly something to do with market perception (whether it is correct or not is a different matter) that x.0 releases are generally buggy and unsuitable for deployment on servers. Whatever the meaning, this is not a new tactic for Red Hat; Red Hat Linux 7 also lacked a ".0".

The quick succession of major number releases was noted by many Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE). Up until now the validity of the rather pricey, but highly valued RHCE certificates was limited to two major releases. Red Hat was quick to react with a policy change: "The validity period for all RHCEs and RHCTs is now officially pegged to the release of the Enterprise product commercially available at the time certification was earned, and certification shall be current until after one (1) major release of the Enterprise product." More details are available here.

All these changes, together with the recently announced restrictions on free access to Red Hat Networks and reduction of support periods are designed with one goal in mind: to increase Red Hat's revenue. Despite some voices of criticism, one cannot blame the company. Red Hat Linux has become the dominant Linux OS on servers and there are possibly thousands of enterprises around the world that use Red Hat's products without ever paying a single cent to Red Hat. The time has come to collect the toll.

As Red Hat tightens the screws, the small and medium enterprises with limited IT budgets -- especially in the current economic climate -- are the ones that are being affected and might even re-evaluate their needs. But do they have alternatives? After all, there are so many Linux distributions, so why use Red Hat? The awful truth is that, for many customers, the alternatives are not particularly appealing. Mandrake and SuSE, despite their ranges of enterprise products, are still perceived as distributions for desktops. Slackware's total lack of interest and ability to market and provide commercial support for their otherwise excellent server product leaves it as a viable choice only for experienced Linux enthusiasts, rather than medium-skilled system administrators. The only other alternative is Debian. But for Debian to make inroads into server rooms, corporations would have to learn to live with a product made by volunteers in their spare time, without any commercial interests. And that's something that is unlikely to happen on a large scale.

Comments (16 posted)

Debian GNU/Linux

The March 25 issue of the Debian Weekly News is out; it looks at the Project Leader election, Trusted Debian, live filesystem CDs, and several other topics.

Debian Planet looks at the Debian Desktop User's Guide, a project to bring up-to-date and effective documentation to new Debian users.

In this Linux Journal article, the author installs and configures Debian's sid (unstable) on his laptop. "Debian has a reputation for being difficult to install. Although this is not necessarily true, Debian's installer is a far cry from the fully automated installers of distributions such as Mandrake and Red Hat. However, there is a benefit to your extra labor: much more control of how the system is laid out, which packages are installed and which kernel features are enabled or disabled. This gives you the freedom to have a system completely tailored to your specific needs."

Debian Planet covers MiniWoody, a modified and updated version of the Debian Woody 3.0 release in order to fit on the confines of a 180MB CD.

A new version of Debian Developer's Packages Overview has been announced. The new version fixes most of the opened bugs and provides many new features.

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Mandrake Linux

MandrakeSoft has announced the release of Mandrake Linux 9.1. There's lots of new stuff, of course, including yet another simplified graphical installer, the "MandrakeGalaxy" theme, Apache 2, and more.

The ext2/ext3 partition format in Mandrake Linux 9.1 is not compatible with older Mandrake Linux releases, so new packages are available for some older distributions so that, for example, a 9.0 system can mount a 9.1-formatted ext2 or ext3 partition.

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Red Hat Linux 9 announced

Members of the Red Hat Network have been notified that they will be able to download Red Hat Linux 9 ISOs beginning March 31, 2003. The new version should be in stores the week after that.

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SuSE Linux Ships its First Server Product for Intel Itanium 2 Processors

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for the Intel Itanium Processor Family will be available by the end of March and has been choosen to drive parts of the scientific computing system "TeraGrid" accessible to thousands of scientists across the USA.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 12

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of March 24, 2003 is out. Topics this week: How to become a Gentoo developer; Changes in the way Gentoo Linux supports CFLAGS; and errata from last week's issue.

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Desktop/LX Deluxe Garners Highly Commended Award from PCW Magazine

The Lycoris Team recieved a 'Highly Commended' award from Personal Computer World Magazine for Desktop/LX. PCW gave Desktop/LX Deluxe a four out of five star overall rating and called the operating system "easy to install, accessible and well configured."

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GNU-Darwin anti-war blackout continues

GNU Darwin has blacked out its home page in protest of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Paradoxically they have experienced a surge in subscription proceeds and CDR sales.

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Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux is a business card size (50MB) Linux distribution based on Knoppix. Despite its miniscule size it strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop. The initial freshmeat announcement for version 0.1 was released March 19, 2003.

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LinuxConsole

LinuxConsole is live Linux CD that can be used to plays games, music, videos, browse the Web, disks, burn CDs and more.

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CRUX

CRUX has released v1.1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Basic support for IPv6 was added. A kernel ptrace security patch was added. Pkgconfig and freetype2 packages were added. About 50 other packages were updated, such as XFree86 4.3, Glibc 2.3.2, GCC 3.2.2, and Mozilla 1.3."

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DeLi Linux

DeLi Linux has released v0.2 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: Kernel 2.2.25 has been added, and some bugfixes in the base package were made. There is a slightl reorganization of the base package. Some packages were upgraded, such as dillo 0.7 and GNU Ghostscript 7.05."

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KNOPPIX

KNOPPIX has released v3.2-2003-03-21 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The Samba, Mozilla, IceWM, larswm, Kismet, Evolution, fontconfig, gnome-pilot, cpuburn, dvd+rw-tools, and OpenOffice packages were updated. KDE 3.1 was included, bugfixes were made, and some of the older games and packages were cleaned up."

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LinuxInstall.org

The LinuxInstall.org Project has released v3.0rc2. "Changes: This release features the 2.4.18-27.8.0 kernel with NTFS support, 31 security updates, Mozilla 1.3.0, Evolution 1.2.3, the complete set of Red Hat 8.0 manuals in HTML, Acrobat Reader 5.06 with a Mozilla plugin, Real Player 8.0 with a Mozilla plugin, Flash Player 6.0.79 with a Mozilla plugin, the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts for Web, Xmms 1.2.7, Xine 0.9.19 with libdvdcss, and a dual-boot configuration with NTFS/FAT32 support."

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OpenNA Linux

OpenNA Linux has released RC2 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This version is devoted to bugfixes, improvements, and general polish of the upcoming major 1.0 stable release."

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VectorLinux

VectorLinux has released v3.2 of its SOHO development branch with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release updates to Vector Linux 3.2 base. There is a brand new auto installer that configures all hardware without user intervention. All applications have been updated to the latest versions including KDE-3.1, Ximian Evolution, GNUCash, OpenOffice, XMMS, Phoenix, and Opera."

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Warewulf

Warewulf has released v1.10 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release adds support in dhcp-build for PXE/Etherbooting (/etc/warewulf/node.conf now takes an additional configuration item "pxeboot" to support this), support in dhcp-build for node-specific Warewulf RAMDISK boot images (the node.conf parameter is "bootimg", and it overrides the default; this is just the first stage, and it has not been documented yet), and support for SWAP monitoring. The output of "wwmon" and "wwstat" has been modified."

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Webfish Linux

Webfish Linux has released v1.0pre1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release incorporates new packages such as glibc-2.2.5 and gcc-3.2.2."

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Red Hat Linux 9 - World's First Look at Shrike (OSNews)

OSNews reviews Red Hat Linux 9. "So what's different about it? Well, for starters (pun intended) the start menu is now far better arranged than the clumsy bloated mess in Red Hat Linux 8.0. It's now clearly laid out and there is even a handy 'recent documents' shortcut called 'open recent' on the menu. Nothing new to Windows users but it's nice to finally see it in Red Hat Linux. Once again, Gnome is the default DE and Bluecurve is the default theme so overall it looks remarkably similar to Red Hat Linux 8.0."

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