Red Hat Scores With RHEL 3.0Red Hat Scores With RHEL 3.0

Most of us have heard the buzz: Red Hat no longer creates a free open-source Linux distribution. As with most rumors, especially those that circulate throughout the Internet in a matter of hours, the reality has been twisted so severely that it contains only a tiny grain of fact.

Truth is, Red Hat has turned over development of its free Linux distro to the open-source community, discontinuing its Red Hat Linux Project internally and merging it with The Fedora Project (fedora.redhat.com), an initiative the company sponsored. The two projects had very similar goals, and according to Red Hat, not having them work together was inefficient. Efforts are under way to combine infrastructures, documentation and Web sites to create a unified look, though the process will take months.

Boasting bleeding-edge technology, Fedora is the proving ground for improvements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Think of its role as developing enterprise Linux in the open-source realm. Whereas RHEL offers new releases every 12 to 18 months and supports those releases for five years, Fedora is much more aggressive. The project plans to deliver new versions, currently called Core releases, every six to eight months, and limit support to three months. So when Fedora Core 2 comes out, users will have only three months to update their hosts before security and bug fixes are no longer ported to Core 1.

The Red Hat engineering team that once worked on Red Hat Linux will be helping with the Fedora Core project, but will now encourage more outside participation. According to Red Hat, changing the name from Red Hat Linux to Fedora also resolves some troublesome trademark issues. By using this more open process, Red Hat hopes to provide an operating system that leverages free-software development practices and proves more appealing to the open-source community.

We installed the Fedora Core 1 release on a desktop-class machine in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs. Those accustomed to Red Hat Linux 9 installs will see little difference: The installer looks exactly like that of Red Hat Linux 9, only it's been rebranded to say Fedora Core 1. Certainly, there are more changes under the hood, but for the most part, Fedora Core 1 is Red Hat 9. In fact, remnants of Red Hat Linux are still there because the release information of Fedora Core 1 is still contained in the /etc/redhat-release file.

Although we were admittedly taken aback upon learning of the vendor's decision to discontinue Red Hat Linux, the company deserves a fair chance: It's still developing a free Linux, but now on a more aggressive schedule with a larger segment of the open-source community. The company's decision was a good choice all around.