RedSleeve is a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

operating system distribution based on the Linux kernel. It is derived from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, ported to the

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

. RedSleeve is derived from the free and

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 ...

software made available 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 ...

, Inc., but is not produced, maintained or supported by Red Hat. Specifically, this product is built from the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions, under the terms and conditions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's EULA and the GNU General Public License. The name RedSleeve was chosen because it makes it intuitively obvious what upstream distribution it is derived from, while at the same time implying that it is for the ARM platform (we have sleeves covering our ARMs). RedSleeve is different from other Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives such as

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

and Scientific Linux in that it is also a port to a new platform (ARM) that is not supported by the upstream distribution.

History

The first official Alpha release was made available on February 12, 2012.

Releases

Versioning scheme

RedSleeve aims to maintain equal versioning with the upstream distribution, both in terms of distribution release numbering and the individual package release numbering. The only exception is with the packages that had to be modified from the upstream release. This is only done to either remove upstream branding as required by the upstream distributions terms and conditions, or to apply additional patches required to make the package build and work on the

which at the time of writing the upstream distribution does not support. In such cases, .0 is appended to the package version after the distribution tag.

Media coverage

RedSleeve Linux 6 was covered on The Register on May 29, 2012.

References

{{Fedora Linux derivatives ARM Linux distributions