Following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 one and a half weeks ago, the Linux distributor has now also released RHEL 4.6, a revised version of the older RHEL 4 series. New features are documented in the availability announcement and the release notes (e. g. for the x86 architecture). Customers with support contracts can obtain the new version as an update or as installation ISOs through the Red Hat Network.
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Among other things, CIFS support in the kernel was updated, and its Out-of-Memory-Killer can now be deactivated. As in RHEL 5.1, new drivers have been added and old ones updated; among the new drivers are, for example, the pata_jmicron driver for the Jmircon ATA controller found on many main boards with Intel chipsets, or the arcmsr driver which supports Areca storage hardware. In addition, Samba, Gdm and Alsa were updated and WPA Supplicant was integrated. RHEL 4.6 also comes with technology previews of GCC 4.1 and OpenOffice 2.0; however, these are outside of Red Hat's support contract.
Meanwhile, the developers of the probably most popular RHEL clone, CentOS, have almost completed cloning RHEL 5.1; they hope to release CentOS 5.1 towards the end of this week or early next week. Similarly, updating is now expected to begin for CentOS 4.6. (jk/c't)
