Pioneer of the Open Source Model

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Introduction

• Red Hat, Inc. is the company behind the distribution, while Red Hat Linux & currently Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the distribution

• Became biggest open source provider prior to being acquired by IBM

• Currently RHEL is used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies

• Red Hat Inc. has rigid trademark rules restricting re-distribution of their official RHEL versions but still provides its source code

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History

• 1993: Company founded by Marc Ewing

• 1994: First Red Hat Linux release

  • Released in October & code-named Halloween

• 2002: RHEL release

  • Pioneered the open source subscription model
  • Fully replaced Red Hat Linux in the following year

• 2022: RHEL 9 released

  • Current release: 9.4 as of 9/11/2024

• 2024: RHEL 10 branched from Fedora 40

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Friends and neighbors

RHEL has many community-driven distributions:

• Fedora
  • Cutting edge community distro
• CentOS Stream
  • RHEL development branch just days/weeks ahead
  • Focus point for community engagement

And is the basis for other products, like OpenShift and OpenStack

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Frenemies

• Amazon Linux 1
  • AL2 - RHEL/Fedora hybrid
• AlmaLinux
• Oracle Linux
• Rocky Linux
• Scientific Linux (defunct)

Oracle, SuSE, and Rocky/CIQ focusing on OpenELA project

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

• Still open source
• Subscription packaging model
• New versions roughly every five years
• 10+ Years of Support
• Stable & reliable, although maybe a little behind on the times
• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a community repo for popular, but unsupported software

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Package Manager

The default package managers for Red Hat distros are both RPM (Red hat package manager) and YUM/DNF.

• RPM

  • Allows for distribution, management, and ability to update software
  • Powerful in terms of installation of packages as well as inspecting and provisioning them

• YUM/DNF

  • Front-end tool for RPM which solves dependencies for packages

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Desktop Environments

• GNOME

That’s it. Others available through EPEL:

• Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, XFCE, i3

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RHEL for business

Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program provides indemnity for copyright claims against the open-source components, while under a paid subscription

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RHEL for government

Red Hat manages the paperwork and testing for compliance certification, such as:

• Common Criteria security
• FIPS 140-2 and FIPS 1403 encryption
• DOD STIG
• US Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB)
• Section 508 accessibility
• FISMA/ FedRAMP
• HIPAA