RedHat

Red Hat Linux is a Linux distribution, which was one of the most popular. It is assembled by Red Hat.

It is one of the Middle-aged Linux distributions; 1.0 was released in November 3, 1994. It is not as old as Slack ware, but certainly older than many other distributions. It was the first Linux Distribution to use RPM as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as the desktop-oriented Mandrake Linux (originally Red Hat Linux with KDE), Yellow Dog Linux (which started from Red Hat Linux with PowerPC support) and ASPLinux (Red Hat Linux with better non-Latin character support).

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 theme.