The new Red Hat Linux beta (codename Severn) is now available. According to the schedule, the beta 1 testing period will last from July 21 to mid-August. Everyone is encouraged to download it and participate by either submitting bugs or submitting fixes. All bugs, requests for enhancements, and patches should be submitted via Bugzilla.

With this release, the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project ? an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.

The goal of the Red Hat Linux project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Red Hat Linux approximately every 4 to 6 months with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Red Hat Linux and will invite and encourage more outside participation than in past releases. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community.



DL:
http://rhl.redhat.com/download/



Source:
http://rhl.redhat.com/

Cool. But will this build do what some of the better ones do, like Xandros, mount all your drives and network. For us Windows guys, that's important because it's just too time consuming to learn about how to configure some of the nuances that Billy Gates took care of years ago or us.

Among the half dozen distros I tried, Red Hat is my least favorite. Easier and more automatic for mounting drives and the network is Xandros. But they've been kind of quiet these past months.

Red Hat is my fav distro, but I will wait a bit before installing it on my system. I have RH9 just right and I feel I might kill something if I upgrade it!

I'll definatley watch it though for developments.

Red Hat Linux is good but what I hear about it now, is doesn't suite my requirements.

Experienced Red Hat users will know that the company abandoned MP3 and DVD support with the release of version 8.0, citing uncertainty over the licensing as the reason for dropping built-in support. Xine has also been excluded in version 9.0, but it takes only a few minutes and a functional Internet connection to add these to a working system.

Licensing squabbles with nVidia also mean there are no new 3D drivers for owners of GeForce or TNT cards. Users have to download and install the appropriate drivers for the kernel they're running. While this isn't a major disappointment, it's still a hassle. Linux distros will never be able to stand toe-to-toe with other operating systems until they come with support for standards like MP3, DVD video and nVidia GPUs straight from the box.