What redhat is all about??

Question

What redhat is all about??

Answer 1

Redhat is a Linux distribution

More computer tips at

http://www.review-ninja.com  

Answer 2

In computing, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) is a company dedicated to free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1995, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide.

Answer 3

Linux is a family. It consists of linux distribution and its associated soft wares.

Redhat is one among the linux distributions

Answer 4

It's a distribution of Linux that is now discontinued.

Answer 5

Red Hat is one of the most commercially successful Open Source companies out there, and it is based on one of the most influential distributions of Linux ever.  In fact, it is often given credit for the success of the Gnome Desktop, which Ubuntu uses, and around 2001, if you wanted to install Linux but didn't know much about OSes, you were more likely to be guided to that -- which makes it the Ubuntu of its time.

The company was founded by Marc Ewing and Bob Young, a Canadian entrepreneur whose red fedora inspired the names Red Hat and later Fedora for their distributions.

Young left Red Hat in 1999, and the company, which is publicly traded and now headquartered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  This was certainly not a catastrophe, however the suits who have taken over have run into a problem:

On the one hand, they have built a substantial part of their business on the good will of developers who obtain the OS for free and write applications for it.  On the other hand almost all their income comes from consulting with and supporting corporations,  This means hand-holding.  That makes it difficult to maintain developers.  Their first response came in 2003/2004 when they divided Red Hat Linux into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the Stable distribution for corporate customers, and Fedora, which they hoped to get more independent developers involved in running as a Free and Open Source project.  

Now all things are relative and Red Hat/Fedora was the simplest and most straightforward distro out there for the technologically challenged, but in 2005 Ubuntu came along, which was a South African distribution specifically intended for the technologically challenged and yes it did attract developers.  Worse, there is a path (which the founder of Ubuntu followed on Slackware and Debian -- the distro Ubuntu is based on) from new user to developer, which Red Hat had been exploiting to get new developers as life happened to their older ones.  

It wasn't just the new users who were jumping to Ubuntu, Ubuntu concentrated ALL its efforts on making Linux accessible.  This meant it wasn't changing a lot of the tools which developers and intermediate users were used to, and many of the latter were becoming more interested as well.

Ubuntu didn't cause their problems, of course.  Their problems are caused by the needs of corporations, and their success with them, and the needs of individuals.  For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been certified by the National Security Agency as the most secure OS out there.  I recently went back to Fedora for a couple of days on a new laptop.  While I had problems up and down the line, when I found that the OS would only let me log in if I was logging into the desk top, I had enough and the machine is running a Gentoo install which takes seven minutes to start the desktop when I am finally ready to go onto it.  I'm still having problems but they are problems I am comfortable with.  When I checked on-line about Fedora's login problem, I found it discussed in one group, where everyone was telling each other, you are a developer.  You know how to get around it.

If I were working for a large corporation, I would go back to Fedora, probably, and recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the corporation, if only because their developers and corporate spokespeople are still the nicest people you are going to meet in the Linux world (after a LOT of turnover).  The closest thing I'm doing to work at this minute is assembling hand puppets which aren't quite well enough assembled to sell (but getting there: I actually make them from scratch, but it's the final stage which should be easy which is the problem for me).  Fedora has gone through a lot of changes recently to make it more accessible to the technologically challenged, like Ubuntu, however, Red Hat's success with the needs of corporations like the New York Stock Exchange, has meant that the focus of the corporation, which does a lot of work with Fedora, is on their needs -- the reason it only lets me sign in to desktop is something called selinux which is a way of running Linux VERY securely.  An acquaintance at my local LUG who works for Cisco recently stated -- loudly -- "I HATE Fedora Core 9.  It's NOT UNIX".  He's right.  Linux is based on Unix.  Combining the needs for Security and other modern responses to the situation out there with the desire to make it simple to set up and run a Fedora Core 9 installation has meant they have rewritten and renamed a lot of scripts and programs so you don't invoke them the same way and they aren't always doing the same things as they used to (or as the other distros do).

That is what Red Hat is all about.  Make of it what you will.

Answer 6

- Red Hat is a leading software company in the business of assembling open source components for the Linux operating system and related programs into a distribution package that can easily be ordered. Red Hat provides over 400 different software packages, including the C language compiler from Cygnus, a Web server from Apache, and the X Window System from X Consortium. The advantages to buying the distribution from Red Hat rather than assembling it at no cost yourself from various sources is that you get it as a single assembled package. Red Hat also offers service that isn't provided as quickly by the individual component developers, including members of the Free Software Foundation. Like all free software, Red Hat's packages allow the buyer to modify and even resell modified versions of code as long as they do not restrict anyone else from further modification.

Red Hat was one of the first companies to realize that "free" software could be sold as a product. After examining the successful marketing campaign of Evian water, Red Hat concluded that to achieve success, the company had to create more Linux users and brand Red Hat as the Linux name that customers preferred. Today, the "Red Hat Plan" is discussed as a model in business schools.