Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

created by

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release in May 1995. It was the first Linux distribution to use the

RPM Package Manager RPM Package Manager (RPM) (originally Red Hat Package Manager, now a recursive acronym) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primaril ...

as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as

Mandriva Linux Mandriva Linux (a fusion of the French distribution Mandrake Linux and the Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux) is a discontinued Linux distribution developed by Mandriva S.A. Each release lifetime was 18 months for base updates (Linux, syste ...

and Yellow Dog Linux. In 2003, Red Hat discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

(RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora Linux, developed by the community-supported

Fedora Project The Fedora Project is an independent project to co-ordinate the development of Fedora Linux, a Linux-based operating system, operating with the vision of "''a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, w ...

and sponsored by Red Hat, is a free-of-cost alternative intended for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the

Fedora Legacy Fedora Legacy was a community-supported, open-source software project to freely distribute patches for critical software bugs and vulnerabilities to users of older versions of the Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core Linux distributions, after the publi ...

project until the updates were discontinued in early 2007.

Features

Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) binaries instead of the older

a.out a.out is a file format used in older versions of Unix-like computer operating systems for executables, object code, and, in later systems, shared libraries. This is an abbreviated form of "assembler output", the filename of the output of Ken Th ...

format. Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called

Anaconda Anacondas or water boas are a group of large snakes of the genus ''Eunectes''. They are found in tropical South America. Four species are currently recognized. Description Although the name applies to a group of snakes, it is often used to re ...

developed by Ketan Bagal, 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 Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

capabilities. In version 6 Red Hat moved to

glibc The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by ...

2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel. It also introduced

Kudzu Kudzu (; also called Japanese arrowroot or Chinese arrowroot) is a group of climbing, coiling, and trailing deciduous perennial vines native to much of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and some Pacific islands, but invasive species, invasive in many ...

, 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 Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers ...

. 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 Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also c ...

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 7.0,

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

was enabled as the default

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...

for the system. This had little effect on

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

-speaking users, but enabled much easier

internationalisation In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic, bi-directional and

complex script Complex text layout (CTL) or complex text rendering is the typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes. The term is used in the field of software internationalizatio ...

languages along with European languages. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing

Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...

an users, whose legacy

ISO-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 8859-1 ...

–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 The Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) is an implementation of the POSIX Threads specification for the Linux operating system. History Before the 2.6 version of the Linux kernel, processes were the schedulable entities, and there were no special f ...

, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat. Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

and

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and

XMMS X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player (software), audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license. History XMMS was originally written as ''X11Amp'' by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made t ...

; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although

royalties A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset o ...

are required everywhere MP3 is patented. Support for Microsoft's NTFS

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.

Fedora Linux

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

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

-based

. The new plan was to draw most of the codebase from Fedora Linux when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora Linux replaced the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to the relationship between Netscape Communicator and

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

, or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

Version history

Release dates were 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. The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22, 2003.

Features

Fedora Linux

Version history

See also

References

External links