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Since 2003, Red Hat has shifted their focus towards the
business marked and Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Red Hat Linux 9 , the final
release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although the Fedora
Legacy project continues to publish updates.
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 late in 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged
with the community-based Fedora Linux project. The new plan is to draw most of
the code-base from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux
distributions. Fedora Core (also known as Fedora Linux) replaces the original
Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to the
relationship between Netscape Communicator and Mozilla, or StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org, although in this case the resulting commercial product is also
fully free software.
Market
Red Hat Linux is marketed primarily as a server operating
system. It is also popular among companies running computing farms and the like
as the built-in installation scripting tool "kickstart" enables fast configuring
and set up of standardized hardware. From version 8.0, Red Hat has also targeted
the corporate desktop.
Special Characteristics
Red Hat Linux is installed with a graphical installer called
Anaconda , intended to be easy to use for novices. It also has a built-in tool
called Lokkit for configuring the capabilities.
As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default font
encoding for the system. This has little on English-Specking users, but when
using the upper part of the ISO 8859-1 character set, characters are encoded in
radically different way. This has been seen e.g. French and Swedish -Speaking
users as an aggressive move, because their old file systems look very different
and might be unusable afterwards. This change can be undone by removing the
UTF-8 part from the Lang setting.
Version 8.0 was also the first to include the Bluecurve desktop
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