| RHEL 5 beta 1 finally arrives |
Sep. 08, 2006
Red Hat Inc. on Sept. 7 finally released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1. In a mailing-list message announcing the release, the company noted that "This is a public beta. Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested in testing this beta release."
RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5 Beta 1 was originally scheduled to appear in mid-July. Originally, beta 2 was to have appeared in September. Despite this delay, Red Hat still plans to get the next version of RHEL out to customers by year's end.
Sources close to the company said that the beta had been delayed because of memory problems. At first, these corruption problems had been laid at the door of Xen, the open-source virtualization program, but further analysis determined that it was a kernel debugging problem. This problem has since been fixed. Indeed, this version of RHEL will include Xen "on the i386 and x86_64 architectures as well as a technology preview for IA64."
This is more than a little surprising, since as recently as mid-August, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens was saying that Xen wasn't ready for prime time yet. Further, Stevens accused of Novell, which had included Xen in its July-release of SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 as "being cavalier [with Xen]." We know what we need to be enterprise-ready and we already have a checklist of everything we need for that. They [Novell] have decided it's more important to be first. That's fine and maybe makes sense for them."
Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe responded that "Red Hat has adopted the John Kerry approach to virtualization: constant flip-flopping. Let's not forget," that until recently Red Hat not only supported Xen, they wanted it to be part of Linux."
Stevens had also said that when it came to Xen, "We don't want to be first, we want to be right." It seems that Red Hat feels approximately three weeks later that Xen is now ready.
As was expected this version of RHEL 5 "is closely aligned with Fedora Core 6 and the upstream community." Fedora Core 6 Test 2 was released on August 7th. Like it, RHEL 5 is based primarily on the 2.6.18 Linux kernel.
This beta release supports multiple hardware platforms including:- 32-bit x86-compatible (i386/i686)
- 64-bit AMD64 and Intel EM64T (x86_64)
- 64-bit Intel Itanium2 (ia64)
- 64-bit IBM eServer iSeries and pSeries and POWER (ppc64)
- 64-bit IBM eServer zSeries (s390x)
However, the architecture of the media kit and RHN (Red Hat Network) channel structure has changed from previous versions of RHEL. There are now only two RHEL variants -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Client, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.
RHEL Client is available for the i386 and x86_64 architectures, only. Beyond the core distribution, the distributions contain optional directories for additional functionality.
For RHEL Server, that's: - Cluster -- Fail-Over clustering and Web load balancing
- ClusterStorage -- Parallel storage access via clustered volume manager and GFS cluster file system
- Virtualization -- Xen virtualization environment
And for RHEL Client, it's:- Desktop -- Desktop applications including Evolution and OpenOffice (not available on the Server)
- Workstation -- Full Engineering Workstation and Developer package set
- Virtualization -- Xen virtualization environment
If you're already an RHEL subscriber, you'll be able to get the beta via a beta channel on RHN within the next 24 hours. An installable binary and source ISO images are also available via RHN, here.
You will be required to login using a valid RHN account with active entitlements. If you'd like to test it and you don't have an active RHEL entitlement, Red Hat suggests that you contact a local Red Hat representative or request an evaluation entitlement at the Red Hat evaluation site. This page currently says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, but you will automatically receive RHEL 5 Beta 1 access along with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 trial subscription.
The installer requires entering a registration key in order to configure the repositories offered for installation. In this beta release, the registration code implementation is a stub and will accept a character combination that then is mapped to the repository selection. The required keys are:Red Hat Enterprise Linux ServerV ==> Virtualization
C ==> Clustering
S ==> ClusterStorage
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client:D ==> Desktop
W ==> Workstation
V ==> Virtualization Thus, on a Server media kit, entering "SV" in the registration code dialog will activate the ClusterStorage and Virtualization repositories. If you use the client, you must always enter "D."
Red Hat would also like to remind any beta users that RHEL 5 is still in development and therefore everything is subject to change and it is not intended in any way, shape, or form for production environments.
The company also noted that users will not be able to update from RHEL 5 beta to the final version.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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