EuroLinux 7.9

 

 EuroLinux is an enterprise-class Linux distribution made and supported by the EuroLinux company, built mostly from code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The project's latest release is EuroLinux 7.9 which enters a new phase of support. "Because EuroLinux 7 is in the second phase of support, there are no revolutionary changes. It is the same stable, mission-critical, proved operating system in which many packages were updated and upgraded to a higher version. It should be anticipated since Enterprise Linux 7 during its life was repeatedly subjected to a reasonably common, aggressive rebase, that is, upgrading packages to recent, nevertheless proven and reliable, versions. Among the most significant changes are: sssd upgraded to version 1.165; pacemaker and stack responsible for clustering updated to version - 1.1.23; MariaDB database updated to this year's version - 5.5.68." The release announcement goes on to mention that EuroLinux 6 raches the end of its normal life cycle on November 30, 2020. However, customes can purchase extended support after this date. EuroLinux can be purchased through the distribution's contact page.

Endian Firewall 3.0 Beta 2

Endian has announced the availability of the second beta build of Endian Firewall 3.0, a major new version of the Red Hat-based distribution for firewalls and routers: "Hey folks, take a look at the Endian Firewall Community 3.0 BETA 2. The new release includes new features relevant to email security, OpenVPN, logging and reporting module and a number of improvements as well. Features, improvements and bug fixes include: SMTP delivery status notification configuration; connections page for VPN users - frontend and backend; add the option "required" to the multiline validator; HTTP proxy information popup is not shown correctly; YAML traceback in domain routing until first domain route configuration; spam blacklists and whitelists typo in tooltip displayed text...." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details summarised in the release notes. Download: EFW-COMMUNITY-3.0.0-beta2.iso (203MB, MD5).

Scientific Linux 6.4

Pat Riehecky has announced the release of Scientific Linux 6.4, a distribution built from source package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and enhanced with software suitable for use in scientific and academic environments: "Scientific Linux 6.4 is officially released. The OpenAFS kernel module package has changed - with SL 6.0 we started packaging the OpenAFS client's kernel module according to the guidelines from TUV's Driver Update Program. Due to unanticipated changes with the 6.3 kernel, we've had to revisit the process. With the 6.4 release, we modified the packaging to provide a dedicated build of the module for each minor SL release, instead of one kernel module (kmod) for all SL6 kernels. Since the EL kernel ABI is supposed to be kept stable within a minor release, this should avoid the problems some SL users experienced." Read the rest of the release announcement for other important notes. Download: SL-64-x86_64-Install-DVD.iso (4,142MB, SHA256), SL-64-i386-Install-DVD.iso (3,510MB, SHA256).

Springdale Linux 6.4

Josko Plazonic has announced the release of Springdale Linux 6.4, a distribution formerly known as PUIAS Linux and built from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4: "We just made Springdale Linux 6.4 available. This release follows the 5.9 release in renames to Springdale - so new name, new logos. Of course the big news is over 1,000 package updates with many goodies and new features. For further information please check RHEL 6.4 release notes. One small note on an issue we've seen during internal testing. New versions of NSS libraries have in effect blocked SSL connections to sites and services using SSL certificates with MD5 hash signatures. For example, if your LDAP server is using such a certificate then sssd will stop working." The release of Springdale Linux 6.4 was announced on 1 March, but the installation DVD images only appeared on the project's main download server and its mirrors today; here is the download link: Springdale-6.4-x86_64-DVD.iso (4,333MB, MD5).

Fedora 18

Fedora 18, the latest stable version of the Red Hat-sponsored community distribution of Linux, has finally arrived: "The Fedora project is incredibly delighted to announce the release of Fedora 18. What's new? The user interface for Fedora's installation software, Anaconda, has been completely re-written from the ground up. Making its debut in Fedora 18, the new UI introduces major improvements to the installation experience. It uses a hub-and-spoke model that makes installation easier for new users, offering them concise explanations about their choices. Advanced users and system administrators are of course still able to take advantage of more complex options. The general look and feel of the installation experience has been vastly upgraded, providing modern, clean, and comprehensible visuals during the process." See the release announcement and release notes for a detailed description of new features. Download (mirrors, torrents): Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso (916MB, SHA256, torrent), Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso (831MB, SHA256, torrent).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9

The legacy 5.x branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has moved to version 5.9, incorporating all recent feature and security updates: "Red Hat, Inc. today announced the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9. This release marks the beginning of Production Phase 2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and demonstrates the company's continuing effort to promote stability and the preservation of customers' investments in the platform. It maintains Red Hat's commitment to a 10-year life cycle through the introduction of several new features, including hardware enablement, security, standards and certifications, developer tools, virtualization, and more. As with all minor releases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 maintains backwards compatibility with hardware and software platforms across the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5." See the press release and the detailed release notes for more information. Existing RHEL customers can obtain the updated installation DVD images from Red Hat's download centre.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Beta

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the availability of the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4: "Today, Red Hat announced the beta availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4. This release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, management, storage and productivity tools. System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) enhancements extend the interoperability experience with Microsoft Active Directory by providing centralized identity access control for Linux/Unix clients in a heterogeneous environment. pNFS client remains in technology preview, however, now delivers performance improvements with the addition of Direct I/O for faster data access." See the press release and the release notes for more details. RHEL customers wishing to test this release can download the installation DVD images from Red Hat's Software & Download Center.

KDE Service Menu 1.4-5 Enhances Konsole Submenu

KDE Service Menu, a software that extends the features of the right mouse click on the Dolphin File Manager for KDE-4 graphical environment, is now at version 1.4-5.

The functionalities enabled by the KDE Service Menu include conversion of several video formats, audio track extraction, sending files to Thunderbird as email attachment, burning ISO files, execution of scripts, text replacing, and many other options.

Highlights of KDE Service Menu 1.4-5:

• "Konsole" submenu has been enhanced.
• A new submenu "GPG Tools" with items "Encrypt" and "Decrypt" on Dolphin's right click menu, has been added;
• "Convert Video" services have been updated;
• A bugfix for "Build Custom Kernel" and "Rebuild RPM Package" has been implemented;
• A new item, "System Information" has been added to submenu "System Tools" on KDE-Services" submenu and Dolphin's right click menu.

A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement. 




Download KDE Service Menu (kde-services) 1.4-5

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 Beta

The legacy release Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 5, is getting one more "Production Phase 1" update on its 10-year life cycle road. A beta build of version 5.9 is now available for download and testing. From the release announcement: "Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the beta of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9. Included in this minor release are a broad set of updates to the existing features. The beta release also provides new functionality in the areas of virtualization and networking, and new support for standards, certifications and security, as well as new features that support certificate-based Red Hat Subscription Management. Also included are additions to capabilities for developers and support for some of the latest platforms from our hardware partners. With new drivers for Microsoft Hyper-V that have recently been accepted by the upstream Linux community, customers can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 as a virtual guest on Hyper-V with improved performance." Existing RHEL customers can download this beta release from Red Hat's Software & Download Center.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 Beta Available for Customers

Red Hat is pushing on with open source virtualization and has just made available the first Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1.

According to Red Hat, this first Beta version will allow Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers to get a closer look to the upcoming platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 Beta will help Red Hat to determine which technologies are good fits for their own infrastructure deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a comprehensive virtualization platform that delivers an open virtualization hypervisor with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and corresponding management tools for both server and desktop virtualization deployments.

A final version will be made available by Red Hat later this year, after a few more development releases. Customers should check out the official release announcement for further details.

Red Hat Announces a Preview OpenStack Distribution

Red Hat has annunced that a preview release of Red Hat's OpenStack distribution-based open-source OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, is now available.

The future is in the cloud and Red Hat wants to make sure they get there first. In case you have forgotten, OpenStack is an open source framework for building private and public IaaS clouds that complements Red Hat's portfolio of open source cloud solutions.

"Through our expanding involvement with OpenStack, we've seen a thriving community develop and are excited in reaching this milestone along the way to delivering an enterprise-class product based on this open cloud technology”, said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president as Red Hat.

According to the developers, The unsupported public preview version of Red Hat's OpenStack distribution is available on the official website.

Stella 6.3

Stella 6.3 is a CentOS remix designed specifically for the desktop - with GNOME 2, working multimedia codecs and many popular desktop applications. The project released version 6.3 yesterday: "Following the release of CentOS 6.3 I finally managed to get Stella 6.3 out as well. This is more an issue of incrementing the numbers since people running Stella have already received the updates from CentOS 6.3. So, what's new in your favourite EL-based remix? Updated multimedia stack - new FFmpeg (0.10.4), MPlayer (1.0svn) and VLC (2.0.3); updated in nux-dextop repository - Clipgrab, Minitube, Audacity 2.0; new inclusions in nux-dextop repository -Megamario (SuperMario clone), Geeqie, Mumble suite, Phantomjs, Tarsnap and SCrypt. Also, as a bit of a news, pkgs.org is now indexing my repositories; as such, searching for EL6 RPMs might give you results from li.nux.ro." Here is the brief release announcement. Download links: Stella6.3_i386.1.iso (1,226MB, MD5), Stella6.3_x86_64.1.iso (1,236MB, MD5).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Comes to Dell Laptops

After the announcement for Dell XPS 13 laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Dell announced a few days ago that they would expand their range of Linux laptops with a new Precision mobile workstation pre-installed with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system.

Two new laptop models were announced by Dell, the Precision M6700, which is the lightest 17-inch mobile workstation that features a 17.3-inch LCD, nine-cell battery and weighs 3.52 kilograms, and the Precision M4700, which features a 15.6-inch LCD, six-cell battery and weighs roughly 2.78 kilograms.

Both Precision laptops will feature Intel's latest third-generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, optional Nvidia Quadro or AMD FirePro high-definition GPUs, USB 3.0/USB 2.0/eSATA ports, and 256GB/512GB SSDs.

The prices will start from 1,649 USD (1,359 EUR) for the Precision M4700, and 2,189 USD (1,800 EUR) for the Precision M6700.

Scientific Linux 6.3 Beta 1

Pat Riehecky has announced the availability of the first beta version of Scientific Linux 6.3, a distribution built from source packages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enhanced with extra applications useful in academic environments: "There should be no expectation that a 'yum' upgrade to SL 6.3 will work. A new install is the recommended method to move from 'sl6rolling'(this alpha release) and the released 'SL 6.3'. Major changes made: LibreOffice - OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice. The LibreOffice packages 'provide' the right packages to maintain compatibility for Kickstart and yum installs; Anaconda - Anaconda now alerts users to the beta status of a release when it is tagged appropriately, upstream has added this functionality and we are taking advantage of it for the beta cycle...." Read the full release announcement. Download the DVD images: SL-6.3-i386-DVD.iso (3,464MB, SHA), SL-6.3-x86_64-DVD.iso (4,093MB, SHA256).

Red Hat’s journey through the “land of the giants”

Open source provider Red Hat claims it is gaining traction in the New Zealand market. Red Hat credits this in part to the establishment of a presence here with the opening of an office in Auckland in April, 2011.
But with last month’s global rollouts of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and upgrades to its JBoss Data Grid and Enterprise Business Rules Management System, the company sees itself in a better position to compete for business with middleware ISVs, systems integrators and resellers.
“Traditionally, organisations have looked to IBM and Oracle for this, and we’ve struggled to gain legitimacy because we lacked a presence and a track record,” says Max McLaren, Red Hat’s MD for Australia and New Zealand.

Rest here

Oracle Linux 6.3

Oracle has announced the release of Oracle 6.3, an enterprise-class distribution based on the recently-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3: "Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 6.3 for x86 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) architectures. Oracle Linux 6.3 ships with two sets of kernel packages: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (kernel-uek 2.6.39), installed and booted by default; Red Hat Compatible Kernel (kernel-2.6.32), installed by default. By default, both the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and the Red Hat Compatible Kernel are installed. Unbreakable Enterprise kernel Release 2 shipped in this update has following driver updates: be2net to version 4.2.220o, bnx2 to version 2.2.1, bnx2x to version 1.72.00-0, cnic to version 2.5.10, cxgb3 to version 1.1.4-ko...." See the release announcement for a full list of updated network and storage drivers. Download: OracleLinux-R6-U3-Server-i386-dvd.iso (2,957MB, SHA1), OracleLinux-R6-U3-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso (3,505MB, SHA1).

Announcements Pour In from Red Hat's Conference

This week, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 conference is going on, and Red Hat is making a number of new announcements. In addition, Red Hat's always highly quotable CEO Jim Whitehurst--a veteran of the airline industry--is out with some notable reflections on the state of open source.
Much has written about Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which gives developers tools and frameworks for building cutting-edge cloud applications. At this week's conference, Red Hat has delivered some forward-looking glimpses at OpenShift's business model. In particular, Red Hat will offer enterprise-class service for it. One strain of the platform and surrounding services will be called FreeShift and remain free, while a paid offering called MegaShift will include full support services from Red Hat.
Red Hat has also announced the Red Hat Pathway to Open Source Enablement consulting service aimed at helping customers "formalize enterprise open source adoption, development, and governance strategies." The strategic business consulting service is scheduled to be available in North America beginning in July, and will expand into additional regions. 
Meanwhile, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has delivered some wise words at this week's conference. As ZDNet notes, there are some key decisions coming up regarding open source and its role in IT architecture:

"Open source has gone mainstream … open source is the default choice of the next generation IT architecture...The decisions we make over the next few years [are critical] … if we have a new architecture with an old business model it still does not get us there."

 Only a few days ago, Red Hat's stock slid after the company reported earnings, but it has since picked up momentum again. And, only recently, Red Hat became the very first billion-dollar-a-year company focused on open source.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Will Have Btrfs

According to Sean Michael Kerner from InternetNews.com, the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system will have support for the Btrfs filesystem.

The Vice-President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, Tim Burke, talked with Sean Michael Kerner, explaining him that Btrfs has been implemented and marked as experimental in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 release, and the next major version, RHEL 7, will have full support for the Btrfs filesystem.

Moreover, Sean Michael Kerner also talked with Wim Coekaerts, Vice President of Linux Engineering at Oracle, who said that Oracle Linux will also have built-in support for the Btrfs filesystem.

Well, it looks like Btrfs will definitely be the default filesystem in many upcoming Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, the latest update of the company's enterprise-class operating system: "Red Hat is proud to announce the global availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes enhancements and new capabilities providing rich functionality particularly in the areas of developer tools, virtualization, security, scalability, file systems, and storage. Highlighted below is a small subset of the new features and enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3. In addition to OpenJDK 6 support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the newly introduced OpenJDK 7 allows customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 to develop and test with the latest version of open source Java." Read the release announcement and release notes for a detailed description of the product. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 is available from access.redhat.com.

Red Hat Announces JBoss Data Grid 6

Red Hat announced on June 20th that JBoss Data Grid 6, an in-memory data grid solution, is now available.

According to Red Hat, JBoss Data Grid 6 provides several new features designed to help enterprises reduce the need for relational databases and scale application development for better big data management.

This mean that users will get a non-intrusive approach to NoSQL, support for high-volume workloads with low-latency, better application scaling with reduced cost, several new features designed to provide enterprises with a number of different access options, and the ability to operate across physical or virtual datacenters.

Based on the popular JBoss Community project Infinispan and including components from JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 is an integrated product that enables enterprises to more easily implement large, transactionally aware data grids.