Red Hat to Update Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users rejoice — an update is coming soon.

RHEL 5.1 has gone into beta. The point release improves features across the board, including virtualization, storage networking and Windows interoperability.

RHEL 5.1 beta is now offering a bevy of updates for Red Hat’s flagship
RHEL 5 platform, which was released in March.

The long list of updates includes improvements to
Microsoft Windows interoperability, as well as an update for Samba, which is a key Windows file and print-sharing technology. Also LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) (define) functionality will be updated to help improve integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory.

Virtualization, which was a key feature addition in the RHEL 5 platform, gets
a boost in 5.1, with support for Intel’s Itanium 2 platform. The
scope of platform support is further extended with 32-bit, para-virtualized
guests getting support on both Intel and AMD 64-bit host operating systems.
RHEL 5.1 will also provide for improved support and performance of fully
virtualized guests.

On the networking side, both Infiniband and Wireless connectivity are
updated. For wireless, Red Hat is pulling the new Devicescape wireless
network, which first appeared in the Linux 2.6.22 kernel that debuted in July.

On the storage side of things, Red Hat has improved the scalability of the
cornerstone Ext3 filesystem in the 5.1 release. According to Red Hat, it now
fully supports filesystem sizes of up to 16TB. Red Hat also claims it has made significant stability improvements to its GFS2 clustered file
system in this release.

Red Hat expects the beta period to last until Sept. 4.

RHEL users have also recently gotten a package boost from their Fedora
community cousins. The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is
now fully under way as an effort to provide Fedora packages for RHEL.

In a mailing list post, Fedora developer Karsten Wade wrote that
EPEL is a community of package maintainers working from inside of
Fedora and that many are the same people who maintain the Fedora version.

“Currently, around 1,000 packages are available, and we’ve been growing at
the rate of several dozen packages every week,” Wade wrote.

This article was originally published on InternetNews.com.