Red Hat Operating Systems

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS - For your mission-critical

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES - For your small and mid-range servers

Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS - For your technical & design workstation clients

Red Hat Desktop - For your secure, managed clients


Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS is the core operating system and infrastructure enterprise Linux solution. It supports the largest commodity-architecture servers with up to 16 CPUs and 64GB** of main memory and is available with the highest levels of support. This makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS the ultimate solution for large departmental and datacenter servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS is supported by an extensive range of applications from leading ISVs, and is certified on systems provided by Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, Bull, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Hitachi. It has garnered impressive industry-standard benchmark results.

All products in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family are based on a common software core--kernel, libraries, development toolchain, and utilities. This provides a homogeneous environment ideal for simplifying multi-system and desktop-to-datacenter configurations. The immediate benefit: simplified deployment of distributed applications, and a consistent environment for users and system administrators across the entire family.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Version 3

Introduced in September 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, version 3, includes a broad range of new features:

  • Support for multiple architectures: Intel X86, Intel Itanium, AMD AMD64 and IBM zSeries, POWER Series, and S/390. (With Update 2, delivered in May 2004, support for Intel EM64T was added)
  • 4-4 memory split: Increased kernel & user address space for X86 systems, allowing support for 64GB of main memory and larger user applications.
  • Native Posix Thread Library: A new high-performance multi-threading capability provides improved performance for multi-threaded applications.
  • Based on Linux 2.4.21 kernel: Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses the latest stable Linux kernel with numerous additions from the Linux 2.5/2.6 kernels.
  • Improved scalability: Support for larger SMP, memory and I/O systems allows version 3 to support servers approximately twice the size of version 2.1.
  • Forward compatibility: Version 3 includes compatibility libraries so it can run version 2.1 applications without modification.
  • Standards and Certification: LSB 1.3 and NIAP Common Criteria. Section 508 support
  • Improved desktop: Includes Red Hat's Bluecurve graphical user interface, and a comprehensive set of personal productivity applications.
  • Enhanced security: Includes several new security features, including support for file system ACLs.
  • Bundled Stronghold: Red Hat's secure web server solution, previously available as a separate layered product for Enterprise Linux AS, has been updated to Apache version 2 and included as part of the base Red Hat Enterprise Linux product set.
  • Improved compiler/tools: Includes GCC 3.2 and debugging/profiling tools.
  • Logical Volume Manager: Provides enterprise-strength storage management.
  • Diskless systems: Supports deployment of diskless clients.
  • Enhanced Java: Java implementations from BEA and IBM
  • Enhanced networking: Includes numerous features to improve stability & performance.
  • Support for Samba 3 provides numerous new features:
    • Greatly improved interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory. Samba 3.0 is able to join an ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/Kerberos
    • Improved Windows 2000/XP/2003 printing support including publishing printer attributes in active directory
    • Support for migrating from a Windows NT 4.0 domain to a Samba domain and maintaining user, group and domain SIDs
    • Support for establishing trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers
    • Support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings
    • Improved ACL mapping