Red Hat recently announced the general availability of the sixth update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform to all active subscribers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 provides a broad set of bug and security fixes, new hardware enablement and back-ports of enhancements in areas such as networking, virtualization, web services, security authentication and file systems. According to Red Hat, the changes introduced in 5.6 include a total of approximately 2,000 individual fixes, as well as approximately 340 individual enhancements and hardware enablement changes.
Although Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 became available for customers in November 2010, Red Hat continues to update the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform through its seven-year lifecycle that extends to 2014.
Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 include enablement of new hardware from Red Hat partners, encompassing processors and chipsets launching in 2011, I/O (iSCSI & iSNS) and multimedia, combined with numerous driver updates. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 provides updated installation media to allow easier installation on new OEM platforms using the newly enabled hardware.
In addition, there are also virtualization feature updates, updated Domain Name Services (DNS) packages, expanded PHP web application stack support, as well as additional new capabilities.
Customers with existing installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 can update their machines online using Red Hat Network or the local update tools included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here. To access the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 release notes, visit here.