Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta released

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Mar. 12, 2008

Red Hat's next update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 5.2, with major upgrades to the desktop and virtualization, is ready for beta testing.

If your business depends on RHEL, you'll want to download this beta to get an idea what your servers are going to be working with in a few months. According to the Red Hat letter making the announcement, the newly renovated RHEL will use the 2.6.18-84.el5 Linux kernel.

This beta is being made available across the entire RHEL family. So you can try both the vanilla RHEL 5.2 and the Advanced Platform version on the AMD and Intel 64, Itanium, S/390, System p, and System z platforms. The beta for the RHEL 5 Desktop for x86 and AMD64/Intel is also being made available.

The major upgrades are going to be in virtualization. RHEL is upgrading its core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to Xen 3.1.2. It also features improvements in its NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) interface as well as support for up to 64 processors per system with up to 512GB of memory per server.

Working beside the virtualization improvements will be upgrades to RHEL's clustering capabilities. The most important of these is better application failover support. Combined, the better virtualization and clustering support should lead to greater server farm stability.

The new RHEL will also be able to boast of superior IPv6 support. This will include a DHCPv6 (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) client and server. With this in place, it will be much easier to deploy IPv6 network addressing across an entire LAN or WAN.

The biggest changes though will be to the RHEL desktop. While Red Hat's big desktop plans, which included support for Microsoft proprietary media formats, seem to have hit a dead end, Red Hat is getting ready to "re-base" its desktop applications.

So the new RHEL 5.2 desktop will come with the absolute newest of the major Linux desktop applications. These include Evolution 2.12.3, Firefox 3, OpenOffice 2.3.0 and Thunderbird 2.0. In addition, the desktop Linux will have better support for laptop suspend and hibernate functions and updated graphic drivers.

The distribution will also include numerous smaller improvements. In particular, each architecture is being addressed with specific enhancements.

For those who want to explore RHEL's cutting edge, this beta will also include several technology previews. Perhaps the most interesting of these will be support for 32-bit VMs (virtual machines) under 64-bit Intel and AMD architectures.

RHEL subscribers willing to give the beta a test run can update their test systems with yum or they can download new installation media from the Red Hat Network site. As always with any beta, Red Hat strongly discourages anyone from running RHEL 5.2 beta on any production system.

—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols

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