Red Hat to launch Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 before March

Red Hat to launch their next major Linux release before March

Red Hat is the biggest vendor of Linux operating system worldwide and the company is expected to ship the next version of its premium Linux product on February 28.

This new updated edition would feature major virtualization technology. However, the release would miss the deadline by almost 2 months.

Originally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was due to ship by the end of current year. The delays were apparent when the company only managed to release first RHEL 5 beta in September. The second beta was released last month.

Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said in a statement: “I’m sure we will ship a gold (version) on February 28.”

Market analyst Charles King added: “Making certain that RHEL 5 is thoroughly locked, loaded and debugged before sending it out the door (is) more important in the end than meeting a deadline.”

Red Hat said that one of the main feature in this update would be inclusion of Xen, virtualization software. Red Hat’s rival Novell had begun including this technology in its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server months ago.