Red Hat Linux
Encyclopedia
Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat
, was a popular Linux
based operating system
until its discontinuation in 2004.
Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called "Red Hat Commercial Linux" It was the first Linux distribution to use the RPM Package Manager
as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux
and Yellow Dog Linux
.
Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora
, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project
and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on 2004-04-30, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy
project until that shut down in early 2007.
instead of the older a.out format.
Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.
In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc
2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel. It also introduced Kudzu
, a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware.
Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called "2.96". The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95's bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha
. Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++
standard, which caused much of the existing code not to compile.
In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, e.g. from Linus Torvalds
' and The GCC Steering Committee; Red Hat was forced to defend their decision.
GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due to stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI
with other compilers. The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called "kgcc".
As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8
was enabled as the default character encoding
for the system. This had little effect on English
-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation
and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic
, bi-directional
and complex script
languages along with European languages
. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western Europe
an users, whose legacy ISO-8859
-based setups were broken by the change.
Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve
desktop theme
. It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE.
Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library
, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.
Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright
and patent
problems. For example, MP3
support was disabled in both Rhythmbox
and XMMS
; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis
, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties
are required everywhere MP3 is patented. Support for Microsoft's NTFS
file system
was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.
-based Fedora Project
. The new plan is to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora replaces the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to the relationship between Netscape Communicator
and Mozilla
, or StarOffice
and OpenOffice.org
, although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully free software
.
written by Linus Torvalds
and associated open source software.
The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22, 2003.
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
, was a popular Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
based operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
until its discontinuation in 2004.
Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called "Red Hat Commercial Linux" It was the first Linux distribution to use the RPM Package Manager
RPM Package Manager
RPM Package Manager is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself...
as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux is a Linux distribution distributed by Mandriva. It uses the RPM Package Manager...
and Yellow Dog Linux
Yellow Dog Linux
Yellow Dog Linux, also known as YDL, is a free and open source operating system for high performance computing on multicore architectures. It focuses on GPU systems and computers using the Power Architecture . YDL is currently developed by Fixstars...
.
Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...
(RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora
Fedora (operating system)
Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...
, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project
Fedora Project
The Fedora Project is an endeavor sponsored by Red Hat to co-ordinate the development of the Fedora operating system. Founded on September 2003 as a result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux and old Fedora Linux projects...
and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on 2004-04-30, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy
Fedora Legacy
The Fedora Legacy project was a community-supported open source project to provide security and critical bug fix errata package updates for versions of Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core no longer officially supported by Red Hat. When it shut down, it was providing updates for Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 9,...
project until that shut down in early 2007.
Features
Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support Executable and Linkable FormatExecutable and Linkable Format
In computing, the Executable and Linkable Format is a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. First published in the System V Application Binary Interface specification, and later in the Tool Interface Standard, it was quickly accepted among...
instead of the older a.out format.
Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.
In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc
GNU C Library
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the C standard library released by the GNU Project. Originally written by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU operating system, the library's development has been overseen by a committee since 2001, with Ulrich Drepper from Red Hat as the lead...
2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel. It also introduced Kudzu
Kudzu (computer daemon)
Kudzu is a hardware probing program which relies on a library of hardware device information.When the computer boots, kudzu detects changes in the running system's hardware configuration, if any, and activates the newly-detected hardware . kudzu only runs at boot time, and then exits...
, a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware.
Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called "2.96". The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95's bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha
DEC Alpha
Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
. Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
standard, which caused much of the existing code not to compile.
In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, e.g. from Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator...
' and The GCC Steering Committee; Red Hat was forced to defend their decision.
GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due to stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI
Application binary interface
In computer software, an application binary interface describes the low-level interface between an application program and the operating system or another application.- Description :...
with other compilers. The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called "kgcc".
As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
was enabled as the default character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
for the system. This had little effect on English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation
Internationalization and localization
In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market...
and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic
Ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
, bi-directional
Bi-directional text
Bi-directional text is text containing text in both text directionalities, both right-to-left and left-to-right . It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text directionality in each row.Some writing systems of the...
and complex script
Complex Text Layout
Complex text layout or complex text rendering refers to the typesetting of writing systems which require complex transformations between text input and text display for proper rendering on the screen or the printed page...
languages along with European languages
Languages of Europe
Most of the languages of Europe belong to Indo-European language family. These are divided into a number of branches, including Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Greek, and others. The Uralic languages also have a significant presence in Europe, including the national languages Hungarian, Finnish,...
. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
an users, whose legacy ISO-8859
ISO/IEC 8859
ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12...
-based setups were broken by the change.
Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve
Bluecurve
Bluecurve is a desktop theme for GNOME and KDE created by the Red Hat Artwork project. The main aim of Bluecurve was to create a consistent look throughout the Linux environment, and provide support for various Freedesktop.org desktop standards...
desktop theme
Theme (computing)
In computing, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customize the look and feel of an operating system, widget set or window manager....
. It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE.
Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library
Native POSIX Thread Library
The Native POSIX Thread Library is a software feature that enables the Linux kernel to run programs written to use POSIX Threads efficiently.-History:...
, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.
Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
problems. For example, MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
support was disabled in both Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. However, Rhythmbox functions on desktop environments other than GNOME.-Music...
and XMMS
XMMS
The X Multimedia System is a free audio player for Unix-like systems.-History:XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp 2 "classic" skins...
; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties
Royalties
Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
are required everywhere MP3 is patented. Support for Microsoft's NTFS
NTFS
NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7....
file system
File system
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.
Fedora
Red Hat Linux was originally developed exclusively inside Red Hat, with the only feedback from users coming through bug reports and contributions to the included software packages – not contributions to the distribution as such. This was changed in late 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged with the communityVirtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
-based Fedora Project
Fedora Project
The Fedora Project is an endeavor sponsored by Red Hat to co-ordinate the development of the Fedora operating system. Founded on September 2003 as a result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux and old Fedora Linux projects...
. The new plan is to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora replaces the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to the relationship between Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
and Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
, or StarOffice
StarOffice
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...
and OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...
, although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
.
Nomenclature
The official name of the Red Hat Linux distribution is Red Hat Linux (often abbreviated to RHL). The first part, Red Hat, is that of the Red Hat software company. The second word Linux refers to the underlying Linux kernelLinux kernel
The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....
written by Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator...
and associated open source software.
Version history
Release dates drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce. Version names are chosen as to be cognitively related to the prior release, yet not related in the same way as the release before that.- 1.0 (Mother's Day), November 3, 1994 (Linux 1.2.8)
- 1.1 (Mother's Day+0.1), August 1, 1995 (Linux 1.2.11)
- 2.0, September 20, 1995 (Linux 1.2.13-2)
- 2.1, November 23, 1995 (Linux 1.2.13)
- 3.0.3 (Picasso), May 1, 1996 (Linux 1.2.X) - first release supporting DEC AlphaDEC AlphaAlpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
- 4.0 (Colgate), October 3, 1996 (Linux 2.0.18) - first release supporting SPARCSPARCSPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
- 4.1 (Vanderbilt), February 3, 1997 (Linux 2.0.27)
- 4.2 (Biltmore), May 19, 1997 (Linux 2.0.30-2)
- 5.0 (Hurricane), December 1, 1997 (Linux 2.0.32-2)
- 5.1 (Manhattan), May 22, 1998 (Linux 2.0.34-0.6)
- 5.2 (Apollo), November 2, 1998 (Linux 2.0.36-0.7)
- 6.0 (Hedwig), April 26, 1999 (Linux 2.2.5-15)
- 6.1 (Cartman), October 4, 1999 (Linux 2.2.12-20)
- 6.2 (Zoot), April 3, 2000 (Linux 2.2.14-5.0)
- 7 (Guinness), September 25, 2000 (this release is labeled "7" not "7.0") (Linux 2.2.16-22)
- 7.1 (Seawolf), April 16, 2001 (Linux 2.4.2-2)
- 7.2 (Enigma), October 22, 2001 (Linux 2.4.7-10, Linux 2.4.9-21smp)
- 7.3 (Valhalla), May 6, 2002 (Linux 2.4.18-3)
- 8.0 (Psyche), September 30, 2002 (Linux 2.4.18-14)
- 9 (Shrike), March 31, 2003 (Linux 2.4.20-8) (this release is labeled "9" not "9.0")
The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22, 2003.
External links
- Fedora Project – History of Red Hat Linux
- Red Hat, Inc. – Linux documentation
- Linux Kernel Organization – Red Hat Archive
- Mapping of RedHat Versions and Code Names to LINUX Kernel Versions