Red hat linux
Red hat linux
Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux; Red Hat first published the software on November 3, 1994. It was the first Linux distribution to use the RPM Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.
In 2003, Red Hat discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007.
HISTORY AND EVOLUTION:
In 1993 Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994 Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux (Ewing had worn a red Cornell University lacrosse hat, given to him by his grandfather, while attending Carnegie Mellon University).
Ewing released the software in October, and it became known as the Halloween release. Young bought Ewing’s business in 1995[clarification needed], and the two merged to become Red Hat Software, with Young serving as chief executive officer (CEO). Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999, achieving the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. Matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in December of that year.Before its IPO, Red Hat had received some funding from Joyce Young, the aunt of founder Bob Young. When Red Hat went public, she cashed in enough stock to recoup her initial investment, then left the remaining stock to linger, “for fun”.
Her return on investment was so great that, by January 2000 she was a millionaire, allowing her to donate CAD$40 million to the Hamilton Community Foundation in June 2000. On November 15, 1999, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions. Cygnus provided commercial support for free software and housed maintainers of GNU software products such as the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, became the chief technical officer of Red Hat and by 2008 the vice president of open source affairs. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell’s Kitchen Systems.
In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat its fourth consecutive “Operating System Product of the Year” award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. Red Hat acquired Planning Technologies, Inc in 2001 and AOL’s iPlanet directory and certificate-server software in 2004. Red Hat headquarters in 2011
Red Hat moved its headquarters from Durham, North Carolina, to N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus in Raleigh, North Carolina in February 2002. In the following month Red Hat introduced Red Hat Linux Advanced Server,later renamed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Dell, IBM,HP and Oracle Corporation announced their support of the platform. In December 2005 CIO Insight magazine conducted its annual “Vendor Value Survey”, in which Red Hat ranked #1 in value for the second year in a row.Red Hat stock became part of the NASDAQ-100 on December 19, 2005.
Red Hat acquired open-source middleware provider JBoss on June 5, 2006 and JBoss became a division of Red Hat. On September 18, 2006, Red Hat released the Red Hat Application Stack, which integrated the JBoss technology and which was certified by other well-known software vendors.
On December 12, 2006, Red Hat stock moved from trading on NASDAQ (RHAT) to the New York Stock Exchange (RHT). In 2007 Red Hat acquired MetaMatrix and made an agreement with Exadel to distribute its software. On March 15, 2007, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and in June acquired Mobicents. On March 13, 2008, Red Hat acquired Amentra, a provider of systems integration services for service-oriented architecture, business process management, systems development and enterprise data services. Amentra operates as an independent company.
On July 27, 2009, Red Hat replaced CIT Group in Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index, a diversified index of 500 leading companies of the US economy.This was reported as a major milestone for Linux. On December 15, 2009, it was reported that Red Hat will pay $8.8 million to settle a class action lawsuit related to the restatement of financial results from July 2004. The suit had been pending in US District Court in North Carolina. Red Hat reached the proposed settlement agreement and recorded a one-time charge of $8.8 million for the quarter that ended Nov. 30. On January 10, 2011, Red Hat announced that it would expand its headquarters in two phases, adding 540 employees to the Raleigh operation, and investing over $109 million.
The state of North Carolina is offering up to $15 million in incentives. The second phase involves “expansion into new technologies such as software virtualization and technology cloud offerings”. On August 25, 2011, Red Hat announced it would move about 600 employees from the N.C. State Centennial Campus to Two Progress Plaza downtown. Progress Energy plans to vacate the building by 2012 if its merger with Duke Energy is completed. Red Hat also plans to rename the building. In 2012, Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open source company, reaching $1.13 billion in annual revenue during its fiscal year.
1.INSTALLATION OF RED HAT LINUX
Step 1 – Insert the Red Hat Linux DVD into the DVD-drive of your computer. As soon as the following screen pops up, press ‘Enter’ to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) through GUI mode. Step 2- RHEL installer would then prompt you conduct a check as to whether the CD media from which you’re installing is functioning correctly or not. Choose ‘Skip’, press enter and the installation would begin. Step 3- Next, we need to select the language- English or any other language as per your preference, and then press ‘Next’. Step 4- In this step, the RHEL installer would ask you about the appropriate type of keyboard for the system.
We take the ‘US English’ keyboard, you can pick any other option depending on the type of your keyboard. Then press ‘Next’ to move to the next step. Step 5- Next, the installer would ask for an ‘installation number’ if you wish to install full set of Red Hat functionalities. Enter the installation number and press ‘OK’ if you have an officially licensed installation number(for corporate clients that buy Red Hat’s backup support and full features). Others can select ‘Skip entering installation number’ and press ‘OK’ to proceed. RHEL would show a warning message, press ‘Skip’ in it to continue. Step 6-
The Red Hat installer would then require you to create partitions in your computer’s hard disk for the installation. You can do it in four ways but the simplest way is to select ‘Use free space on selected drives and create default layout’ as this option will not affect any other OS residing in your system. Check the ‘review and modify portioning layout’ to create partitions and click next. Step 7- In this step you must create the required system partitions and mount points such as ‘/boot’, ‘/home’, ‘swap’ etc which are required for the Linux’s proper functioning. To create different partitions such as /home, /var etc, click on ‘New’ to create the partitions.
Then, select /home in the mount point and choose ‘ext3’ as the file system and give the desired size for it and then click ‘OK’. Similarly also create /boot and /var. Also, create a swap partition by clicking on ‘New’ and then choosing the filesystem as ‘swap’ and also give the size of Swap partition.(Usually size of swap partition SHOULD BE twice the size of RAM available to the system but you can keep its size less than that too). Once you have made all the desired partitions and given their mount points, click ‘Next’ to continue installation. Step 8- This step pertains to the default OS that will be loaded by the GRUB loader.Click ‘Next’ to continue. Step 9- This step pertains to the network settings of the Linux system that you are going to install. You can select the Ethernet devices through which the system would communicate with other devices in the network.
You can also provide the hostname, Gateway address and DNS address to the system during this step. (However it’s better to adjust these settings once the system has been fully installed). Step 10- The next step is to adjust the system clock to your particular time zone. Select your time zone and then click ‘Next’. Step 11 – This is a very important step that deals with the root(super-user) password for the system . Type the password and confirm it and then click next. Step 12 – The RHEL installer would then prompt you about if you wish to install some extra ‘Software Development’ or ‘Web Server’ features. By default, keep it at ‘Customize later’ and press ‘Next’. Step 13- This next step will initiate the installation of Red Hat Linux, press ‘Next’ to begin the process. Step 14- Press Reboot and you’d be ready to use your newly installed Red Hat Linux OS. POST INSTALLATION CONFIGURATIONS
1. Accept the Red Hat License agreement and click ‘Forward. 2. The next step is regarding the configuration of the Firewall. You can Enable or Disable the firewall according to your preferences and then click ‘Forward’. 3. Next step is about the configuration of another security tool- SE Linux. By default you should keep it ‘Disabled’ unless you’re working with very secure information. 4. You can also choose to configure the Kdump, that stores information about system crashes if your system fails but uses valuable disk space. By default don’t enable . 5. Next, adjust the time and date settings, and then click ‘Forward’. 6. T
he next step is for software updates from Red Hat, at this point you should skip the registration and register at a later time and then click ‘Forward’. 7. This step is to create a non-admin user for the system. Enter the details and click ‘Forward’. 8. This step is about configuration of your Sound Card, choose a sound device and then click ‘Forward’. 9. Click ‘Forward’ to complete the configurations and start using your Red Hat Linux OS. Your Red Hat Linux OS is now all installed and configured, ready to be used.
Whole Foods Market, a US organic grocer, has used Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. According to Red Hat, the implementation allowed the company to reduce costs, reallocate resources and
enable the IT department to focus on strategic business initiatives. Optimised systems
Telco Verizon Communications was selected for its consolidation and standardisation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was used on its SAP and PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and support growth. Red Hat said Enterprise Linux, allowed Verizon to run its servers more efficiently, with minimal need for additional equipment. Superior alternatives
Union Bank, the 16th largest bank in the US, migrated its operating platform from AIX/Websphere to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss. Red Hat said the migration supported mission-critical applications at an improved price, greater performance and with less up-keep. Union Bank used open source to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment. Extensive ecosystem
Hilti, a technology provider to the global construction industry, has standardised on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to handle its SAP applications, including SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management, with more than 5Tbytes of data. Hilti migrated its critical systems from a Tru64 Unix-based system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS). The migration to Red Hat delivered increased application performance, reduced electricity costs and provided the company with a long-term platform strategy, Red Hat said. Outstanding open source architecture
Ecommerce, a global web hosting and e-commerce services provider has worked with Red Hat specialist Vizuri to develop an Intelligent Data Centre web services hosting platform that aims to improve customer service, reduce customer turnover and cut operational costs.
Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support Executable
and Linkable Format instead of the older a.out format. Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities. In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc 2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel. It also introduced Kudzu, a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware.
Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called “2.96”. The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95’s bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha. Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++ standard, which caused much of the existing code not to compile. In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, e.g. from Linus Torvalds’ and The GCC Steering Committee;Red Hat was forced to defend their decision. GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due to stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI with other compilers.
The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called “kgcc”. As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This had little effect on English-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic, bi-directional and complex script languages along with European languages.
However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users, whose legacy ISO-8859-based setups were broken by the change. Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme. It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.
Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties are required everywhere MP3 is patented. Support for Microsoft’s NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.