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Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat sells the most successful commercial distribution of Linux today. The company offers versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for server and workstation configurations. It also sponsors the non-commercial distribution Fedora.

History

Red Hat was founded in 1994 by Marc Ewing. Bob Young purchased the company in 1995, renamed it Red Hat Software, and began shipping release 2.0 with a revolutionary new package management system called RPM that same year.

Red Hat went public in 1999. The IPO made the 8th largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, prompting Red Herring magazine to name Bob Young as one of the "Top 10 Entrepreneurs of 1999."

Also in that year, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions, the first profitable open source company. Red Hat became profitable for the first time in 2003, after having adopting the "sell service not software" philosophy successfully used by Michael Tiemann at Cygnus by selling subscriptions for support.

In 2003, Red Hat launched Fedora, a non-commercial distribution made from and containing only "free as in speech" software. While Red Hat's commercial distributions -- server and workstation -- remain focused on security, stability, and supportability, Fedora more of a leading/bleeding edge distro with excellent desktop prospects.

In spite of its commercial success, Red Hat is a company that is still admired by the free software community for its adherence to the principles embodied in free software.

Installer and packaging system

Both RHEL and Fedora use a utility called Anaconda for installation. Anaconda can run either as a GUI or command-line installer. It detects the system hardware and selects the appropriate packages for what it finds. It can save what it finds for you, so if you have replicate the installation across a number of identical machines, you're one step ahead.

RPM has become more sophisticated over the years, and the latest release of RHEL uses a utility called yum to install the packages; earlier releases used up2date. Both resolve dependency issues at install time, making "dependency hell" a thing of the past.

Derivative distros

Traditionally, most new Linux distributions have been referred to as being either Red Hat- or Debian-based depending upon which package management system they included -- Red Hat's RPM or Debian's dpkg and APT tools. From that point of view, the list of distributions which began life as Red Hat derivatives is very long.