Gauri Shiv Enterprises

This is the second blog in a three-part series highlighting presentations from Open Your World, an online forum presented by opensource.com. The open source ideals of participation, collaboration, community, transparency and meritocracy are increasingly being applied to the areas of government and law across the globe. The three Open Your World sessions outlined below further explore open source in government and law.

Graham Taylor of OpenForum Europe (OFE) and Karsten Gerloff of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) cited standardization policy as the principal battleground for free software and open source communities in Europe. Debate over the definition of an “open standard” has become a contentious one. In their Open Your World session, Taylor and Gerloff outlined European member state achievements and strategies moving forward, particularly in an atmosphere of economic difficulty. Read more here and to hear their full discussion, access the archived talk here.

In the United States, President Obama has pledged a more open and transparent government since his early days in office. Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization with more than a thousand members across tech industry leaders, non-governmental organizations and academic research institutions, advocates for the use of open source technology in the US Federal government. Jeremy Allison of Google and Terri Molini of Initmarketing, presented at Open Your World on behalf of OSFA. They discussed how OSFA is working to centralize the advocacy and messaging around open technologies and helping the US government and agencies understand the benefits they can achieve with open source technologies. To hear the full discussion, access the archived talk.

Richard Fontana, open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat, led a discussion on some of the legal aspects of open source including license compliance and how core open source principles apply as legal rules and customs to software. Over several decades, concepts of exclusive property rights, such as copyright, have been imposed on software. Free software licensing models emerged in reaction, and were an attempt to restore the original code-sharing commons. Fontana discussed the problem of defining free software/open source and also distinguished the major categories of open source licenses. He also focused on the details of open source license enforcement and compliance and noted that the real key to compliance is to make an effort to understand and satisfy the reasonable customary expectations of upstream open source developers. To hear the full discussion, access the archived talk.

Opensource.com also hosted a session at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston on June 25th where some of the opensource.com moderators and contributors, including Richard Fontana, discussed the community and how to get involved with opensource.com. Panelists and audience members shared many great stories on how they are applying open source principles beyond technology. Check out some of the conversations started during and after Red Hat Summit and JBoss World including the opensource.com tweet-up held during the event.

Want to contribute to opensource.com? Read more about how to participate here.

Live from the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat outlined its cloud strategy and roadmap with several new announcements, including the introduction of a new family of offerings known as Cloud Foundations, delivering comprehensive solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds. The Cloud Foundations offering includes industry-leading products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, expert professional services and training classes – elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds.

As part of Cloud Foundations, Red Hat Consulting introduced two new offerings for our customers: Cloud Quickstart and Cloud Foundations Pathway. Despite the publicized benefits of cloud computing, most organizations are still determining whether and how to apply it to their business. With these new offerings today, Red Hat Consulting is helping organizations pursuing a path to cloud adoption navigate through the uncertainty and establish a solid foundation. Our business and technical consulting services paired with Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Edition One are designed to help customers demonstrate a prototype cloud infrastructure solution, develop a strategic roadmap for cloud adoption, and establish a solid foundation for present and future cloud initiatives.

Here’s more information about our new offerings:

Cloud Quickstart
Red Hat Cloud Quickstart equips organizations with the expertise, high-level support and knowledge transfer to rapidly build, manage and optimize a cloud solution tailored to a customer’s unique technology environment. Designed to provide an optimal introduction to cloud computing, the Cloud Quickstart leverages Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, Edition One reference architecture to help assess the viability of a cloud environment for a customer’s enterprise.

During this short-term engagement, an experienced consultant will:

• Demonstrate a prototype cloud infrastructure solution,
• Install, setup and configure Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Edition One set of integrated products, documentation and reference architectures (to 10 servers),
• Prepare IT staff to manage virtualization tasks independently after the engagement, and
• Provide knowledge transfer and complete documentation

For customers ready to develop proof points of cloud viability, the Quickstart can be coupled with the option to migrate 1-2 workloads to the established test cloud to deliver a proof of concept.

Cloud Foundations Pathway
A recommended first step in any cloud strategy is to ensure a customer’s infrastructure is ready and optimized for cloud computing. To help organizations move into a future of cloud computing and business agility, Red Hat offers its Cloud Foundations Pathway. This strategic service consists of a series of tailored consulting engagements that leverage open source expertise, product recommendations and best practices to:

• Explore cloud viability,
• Develop a strategic roadmap for cloud adoption, and
• Establish a cloud platform to serve as the foundation for present and future cloud computing initiatives.

Each Pathway begins with an assessment of the organization’s business goals, the maturity of its IT infrastructure, an exploration of open standards, concepts and alternatives and strategic recommendations for the organization to achieve its business goals.

These new cloud Consulting services from Red Hat are available today. To learn more about these offerings, visit here.

During the closing ceremony for the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World last week in Boston, I was pleased to highlight the work of some of our customers using Red Hat and JBoss products to innovate their IT environments. We recognized nine customers across a variety of industries in the fourth annual Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards. It was truly a global affair with winners from countries including India, New Zealand, Argentina and the United States in attendance to accept their awards.

The five categories and finalists for 2010 included:

Optimized Systems
Red Hat: LifeSpring Hospitals
JBoss: Travel Channel

Superior Alternatives
Red Hat: Citigroup
JBoss: State of Tennessee

Carved Out Costs
Red Hat: BNZ
JBoss: Nationwide Mutual Insurance

Extensive Ecosystem
Red Hat: Just Dial
JBoss: ANSES

Outstanding Open Source Architecture
Red Hat and JBoss: Union Pacific Corporation

Voting for the Innovator of the Year awards was open to the entire open source and Red Hat community to select the two overall Innovation Award winners – one Red Hat and one JBoss winner. This year’s Red Hat Innovator of the Year Award went to Just Dial, selected for its migration from a Microsoft DOS-based client server system to a web-based system powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just Dial was able to increase the flexibility and decrease IT and licensing costs by migrating from proprietary software to open source solutions.

The JBoss Innovator of the Year went to Travel Channel. The company was selected for its implementation of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network to manage and monitor its website in an effort to ensure visitors have positive experiences with no downtime or viewing difficulties. Travel Channel used open source solutions to enhance risk management and capacity planning, increase throughput 20-fold and to increase application availability.

These companies are using open source to create a competitive advantage in their IT organizations and they have achieved impressive results. Please read more about all of the Innovation Awards winners by viewing their full submissions and case studies.

We just wrapped up a successful Red Hat Summit and JBoss World last month that saw record attendance levels. Not only did we have a great time learning and networking at the events, we also had the opportunity to recognize Red Hat’s partners, customers and contributors for their work in open source and the technology industry. Did you miss this year’s event? Don’t worry, you can download the presentations, watch the keynotes and read our blog at www.theredhatsummit.com. Be sure to check us out next year when the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World return to Boston, May 3-6, 2011! To get up-to-date information about next year’s Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, visit here.

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global
Red Hat is coming to a city near you! Join Red Hat for a free, half-day business seminar as Red Hat travels city-to-city this fall during our 2010 Road Tour to deliver, “Unlocking the value of the Cloud.” To learn more about the 2010 Road Tour and to sign up for more information, visit here.

Red Hat will host “Introduction to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Webinar Series #3: Get the Most Out of IT by Virtualizing with Red Hat” on July 13 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Speakers include Erik Jacobs, Red Hat solutions architect, and Fred Osborne, Red Hat virtualization specialist. To learn more and to register, visit here.

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Red Hat will be at booth 633 at Campus Technology 2010, July 19-22, 2010 at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. Be sure to stop by! To learn more and to register, visit here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

Red Hat will host a Webinar: “Future of Cloud Computing with Open Source Tools” on July 7, 2010 in Australia and New Zealand. In this session, we will cover existing and emerging technologies, business challenges involved in implementing a cloud, the importance of bridging the interoperability challenges to integrate on-premise and external clouds, seamless application orchestration across public and private clouds, requirements and strategies for building a robust and scalable open cloud ecosystem, and addressing security concerns. At the end of the session Red Hat cloud experts and architects will be available for Q&A. For more information, visit here.

Red Hat is sponsoring the 2010 New Zealand CIO Summit, July 20-21, 2010. Come visit us to discuss how you can unlock the cloud with open source tools. For more information and to register, visit here. We’re also hosting an exclusive pre-event lunch for invited CIOs on July 19, 2010. Analysts from IDC and a Red Hat customer will be covering the emergence of open source as a platform for cloud computing. This event is by invitation only. Express an interest to jelchah@redhat.com.

Red Hat will host the first session in a six-part JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Webinar Series on July 21, 2010. In this session, the JBoss Application Platform Management product team will present “One Size No Longer Fits All: An Overview and Road Map of JBoss Solutions for Java Applications.” For more information and to register, visit here.

Join us at CIO Summit 2010: The 21st Century CIO, July 22, 2010 in Sydney. Red Hat customer, Mark Corbould, Assistant Director-General Information Technology, National Library of Australia will be presenting a case study on the National Library of Australia’s use of open source software to develop online services and expose its collections to Australians and the world. This presentation will cover both the IT and organizational issues in developing such systems, managing the resulting services, and supporting staff and public users of these services. For more information, visit here.

Red Hat is sponsoring a roundtable discussion on virtualization and cloud computing at the FutureGov Forum Australia, July 26-27, 2010 in Canberra, Australia. For more information and to register, visit here.

For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

Jared Smith, the new Fedora Project Leader, will make his debut appearance at FUDCon Santiago in Chile, July 15-17, 2010. FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference and includes a combination of sessions, talks, workshops and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. Topic include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, and many others. Attendance is free and more information about FUDCon Santiago is available here.

For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.

Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

Customer and partner testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is in full swing, and we have been very pleased with the strong positive feedback that we have received from our testing community. We are on track to deliver a final product that we expect will meet customer needs for years to come. The first Beta was released in April, and incorporated a wide range of new and upgraded features. Today we have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2, which provides an updated installer, additional new technologies and resolutions to many of the issues that were reported in the initial Beta.

As we move through the Beta process, we will continue to integrate corrections and suggestions identified by our internal testing groups, customers, partners and community members. Today’s Beta 2 offers the Red Hat Enterprise Linux community the opportunity to take a deeper dive into the features and technologies that we expect to provide in the final release.

We are asking customers and partners who are testing the initial Beta to install and continue their testing with Beta 2. This will help us to deliver the best possible final product. Beta 2 also provides an excellent starting point for new testers. Depending on testing and feature requirements, an additional Beta may be released in the coming weeks.

To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2 and to download the installation kits, visit the Beta portal here. The portal also provides detail on how to report issues and feedback to Red Hat.

If you’d like to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 updates, please subscribe to the following mailing lists:

1. For general announcements related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
2. For discussions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 betas

For additional information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, check out our Feature, Function, Benefit profile or tune in to the replays of our related Red Hat Summit presentations.

Every Fedora release provides an opportunity for renewal and change. Our recent release of Fedora 13, which is being hailed by many as one of our best releases ever, is no exception. As we embark on another exciting development cycle, we also have the opportunity to renew the leadership of the Fedora Project as part of our commitment to change and evolution. In July, Jared Smith will join Red Hat as the new Fedora Project Leader, taking over the role from Paul Frields.

Paul joined Red Hat in February 2008 just a few months after the release of Fedora 8, succeeding Max Spevack. Before that Paul was involved deeply in Fedora, working on documentation, packaging, marketing, and as a founding member of the Fedora Board. He will remain with Red Hat, working in a new operational role with our Red Hat Enterprise Linux teams and assisting Jared during the transition period.

Jared Smith has been a long-time user of both Red Hat and Fedora, and has been an active participant in the Fedora community since 2007. He has primarily spent his time working with the infrastructure and documentation teams. He has helped with the development of Fedora Talk, our community VoIP telephony system. Fedora Talk allows various Fedora developers and contributors to communicate verbally for free across the Internet. Jared has also participated in community events such as various FUDCons and Fedora Activity Days.

Jared also brings a wealth of of both technical and community relations expertise from his prior job history. Jared’s previous employer is Digium, the commercial sponsor of the open source Asterisk software. While at Digium, Jared worked as Community Relations Manager, as well as an instructor, lecturer, and training department manager. Before working for Digium, Jared was a Network Operations Manager for the web analytics company Omniture (since acquired by Adobe Systems), where he managed a network of more than 6,500 Linux machines.

Over the past several years, Red Hat has continued to grow its commitment to Fedora. This comes in part as a direct result of the success Fedora has enjoyed as a community powered research and development lab. We’ve added several new members to the Fedora Engineering team over that time. Each of these people is tasked with not just developing services and projects within Fedora that create an infrastructure of participation, but to create community around these initiatives. In addition, Red Hat’s Community Architecture team continues to lead efforts to effectively measure our success at growing these communities, and identify additional opportunities for strategic investment.

The partnership between these teams, and indeed the rest of Red Hat, and the Fedora Project has allowed us to:

• More finely tune our release processes and schedule, to provide a series of increasingly successful Fedora releases and serve as an effective upstream for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6;
• Substantially increase the size of Fedora’s vibrant, friendly community of contributors;
• Participate in a growing number of global open source events, thanks to a team of hundreds of Fedora Ambassadors empowered to lead growth and awareness in their locales worldwide; and
• Increasingly become recognized as leaders in advancing the state of free and open source software, by working closely in collaboration with upstream projects.

There are always additional challenges ahead, and the Fedora Project Leader meets those challenges through strategic vision, building consensus in an open and transparent way, and helping all the facets of our community to work together smoothly. We thank Paul for his dedication to this important role, and now join the entire Fedora community in welcoming Jared to our team.

Jared will make his first appearance as Fedora Project Leader at FUDCon Santiago, Chile to be held July 15-17, 2010, and following that event, the 11th annual Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL 11), to be held July 21-24, 2010 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Fedora Project has seen strong growth and interest in open source from the community in Latin America, with over 100 Fedora Ambassadors located in that region alone.

As the 2010 Red Hat Summit takes place this week in Boston, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will take a center stage at the event. The next generation of Red Hat’s flagship operating platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 entered Beta in April, packed with hundreds of new features for customers, partners and the community, covering physical, virtual and cloud deployments. The Beta includes an update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux package set with enhancements that cover power management, performance and scalability, reliability, security and resource management, virtualization, greener IT and power/cooling efficiency features and much more.

Red Hat Summit attendees will enjoy detailed insights into all of these features in a wide variety of technical presentations, labs and campgrounds. Meanwhile, executive and partner keynotes will provide strategic roadmaps, while our Red Hat Innovation Awards winners will describe their IT environments and experiences for a wide range of real-world deployments.

The following list gives an indication of the range of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 topics that will be covered – everything from roadmaps to in-depth analysis:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Roadmap: Tim Burke, Vice President, Platform Engineering
• KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Bill Burns, Engineering Manager
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Feature Overview: Steve Grubb, Principle Engineer
• Clustered Application Services and Filesystems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Thomas Cameron, Solution Architect Team Lead, and Lon Hohberger, Principle Software Engineer
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Advanced Diagnostic Capabilities: Jiří Moskovčák, Software Engineer, and Andrew Hecox, Support Diagnostics Program Manager
• Performance Analysis and Tuning of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: D. John Shakshober, Senior Consulting Software Engineer, and Larry Woodman, Consulting Software Engineer

For the full Red Hat Summit session agenda, visit here.

In addition to the regular sessions, there will also be a number of presentations in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-focused booth in the Campground. These provide a more ad-hoc environment where attendees and Red Hat engineers can work together on strategic discussions, feature requests, technical issues and interactive presentations. Campground booths are scheduled:

• Wednesday, 7:30-8:30 am: Automated Bug Reporting Tool (demo); Power Management (demo)
• Wednesday, 12-2 pm: Tools – Maximize Developer Productivity
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer input forum
• Wednesday, 5-7 pm: Virtualization
• Thursday, 7:30-8:30 am: Resource management (cgroups) / network performance
• Thursday, 12-2 pm: Storage / Filesystem
• Thursday, 5-7pm: Performance
• Friday, 10am-12pm: Desktop

For more information about the Red Hat Summit, visit here.

Stay tuned for new details on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 coming soon.

We think Red Hat is a great place to work and our associates from Buenos Aires to Brno to Boston are proud to hang their hats each day at Red Hat’s many offices across the globe. Red Hat’s technologies drive some of the world’s largest enterprises, and the company’s development has been fueled by the power of the open source model.

Red Hat’s success starts with our associates and we foster a culture of participation beyond just the open source model used to develop our products and technologies. At Red Hat, we operate differently from many companies and default to openness in how our associates interact. Rather than starting from a point where associates choose what to share, Red Hatters start from a point where they choose what not to share. Transparency is highly valued in all positions whether someone works in engineering, human resources, IT, sales, operations, facilities, finance, marketing, or any other department within Red Hat.

We’re proud that Red Hat’s culture and work environment has recently been recognized outside of our company walls. Here are a few of our recent achievements:

• Computerworld, Best Places to Work in IT
  For the second consecutive year, Red Hat’s IT department in the United States has been named to Computerworld’s annual Best Places to Work in IT list. Now in its 17th year, this awards program showcases the IT departments that offer workers great benefits and compensation, along with a stimulating work environment. Computerworld also surveyed the IT workers at nominated companies for the list, and their responses factored heavily in determining the rankings.

  Scot Finnie, editor in chief of Computerworld, noted the following about Red Hat’s win:“To be among the Best Places to Work in IT, it’s not enough just to seek out and hire the most talented IT people, offer them competitive pay and provide great benefits. The organizations that made this year’s Best Places to Work list sustain a dynamic work environment in which IT professionals keep their hands on the latest technologies and work on projects that are business critical.”

• Red Hat Czech Republic, Employer of the Year, Zaměstnavatel roku 2010
  Red Hat was named Employer of the Year in the Czech Republic in the progressive employer category for the 2010 awards program sponsored by Sodexo. The company was recognized earlier this year as a regional winner for Moravia and Silesia. Out of the regional winners, Red Hat was selected as the national champion, scoring 30 points higher than the second place winner. Criteria evaluated for the award include career opportunities within Red Hat, education and personal development, management, trust in the corporate culture and values, compensation and benefits and competitiveness in the labor market.
• Apertura/Business Week, Best Companies to Work for in Argentina
  Red Hat was ranked number four in the 2009 best companies to work for list in Argentina by Apertura/Business Week. Company associates in Argentina were surveyed on a variety of topics including internal and international mobility, career path, training, scope of benefits, social programs, attrition rate and internal environment and climate. Red Hat made the list in 2008 as a top ten company and moved up to the number four ranking in 2009.

Red Hat associates care about the work they do, the talented people around them and the company as a whole. We’re proud to be recognized as a great place to work across the globe.

At this year’s Red Hat Summit and JBossWorld we are hosting the inaugural JBoss Users and Developers Conference, JUDCon. The conference will focus squarely on developers and the development community surrounding the JBoss Community and will feature deep dives into selected projects, hands-on labs and hackfests.

Co-located with the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, JUDCon is taking place the day before on Monday, June 21st and has three tracks; a JBoss AS5/6 track for the application server, a combined Cloud/Portal track, and a Community track which was voted on by participants.

While JBoss World has always focused on the development community this sub-conference is an opportunity for the JBoss Development Community to dive deep into the code, understand how it works, and in fact help decide the future of many projects.

There is no question that the JBoss Community is where innovation begins and it is our goal to strengthen and facilitate innovation among this elite set of engineers. Projects like the JBoss Application Server, Seam and Hibernate, have helped to shape modern middleware computing. It is our hope that at this rapid pace of innovation will continue at JUDCon and future events where the JBoss Community will have an opportunity to freely collaborate on projects like Weld, Arquillian & Shrink Wrap, HornetQ, Errai, Infinispan, TorqueBox, BoxGrinder and Cooling Tower and many more.

We plan to continue to work with the Community to expand participation and strengthen collaboration so look for longer, stand-alone JUDCons world-wide – in Europe, Latin America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere. To learn more about JUDCon, visit http://www.jboss.org/events/JUDCon.html

Opensource.com recently presented Open Your World, an online forum exploring how the open source ideals of participation, collaboration, community, transparency and meritocracy are applied beyond the technology industry. The forum featured ten presentations focused on open source applications across a variety of areas from music, government and business to healthcare, law and education. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a series of blogs highlighting and recapping presentations from Open Your World.

Dr. David Upton, chair in Operations Management at Oxford University, kicked off the forum with a presentation entitled, “Radically Simple IT…Or, a Strategic Argument for Open Source in Business.” Dr. Upton highlighted how open source principles can help business leaders transform how they approach and engage the more traditional strategic planning process. Read more about Dr. Upton’s presentation here. To hear Dr. Upton’s specific advice for designing for improvement, including his definition of improvable systems and the necessity of open source thinking to bring them to life, listen to his archived talk.

Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, delivered a presentation entitled “The Stimulus and Standards.” He talked about the future of healthcare, the economic stimulus and standards. Dr. Halamka maintains a datacenter that holds a couple of petabytes of healthcare data for three million patients. The entire infrastructure runs on Red Hat technologies and Dr. Halamka hasn’t experienced downtime in a couple of years. Listen to his archived talk here. Watch the below video of Dr. Halamka talking about Open Your World.

Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s vice president, Open Source Affairs, pulled double duty as host of Open Your World and also as presenter of the session “Transformation, the Open Source Way.” In his presentation, Tiemann applies the lessons of Darwin to Deming toward transforming the model of IT using the open source way. Adaptability leads to reuse, which leads to sustainability. Read more about Tiemann’s presentation here. Listen to the archived presentation here.

Going to Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston next week? Be sure to catch the opensource.com session on Friday, June 25 from 9:45-10:45 a.m. ET. Come talk about the ways you’re using open source principles–sharing, collaboration, transparency–outside of your IT department. Opensource.com offers a space to discuss applying those open source principles beyond technology.

In this session, some of the opensource.com moderators and contributors–Michael Tiemann, Richard Fontana, Paul Frields, Ruth Suehle, and Jason Hibbets–will discuss the community and how to get involved. They will also share some of the open source stories they’ve heard since the site launched. During Q&A, they hope you’ll take the chance to share your own story.

On May 27, Red Hat will sponsor “Open Your World,” a day-long virtual forum presented by opensource.com and hosted by Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann, Vice President, Open Source Affairs. The virtual event will feature ten presentations exploring how the open source ideals of participation and collaboration are impacting business, education, government, law and life.

The presentations will provide attendees with a view of how open source principles play a larger role beyond technology to innovate and solve problems. We hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to grow and encourage the use of open source thinking across multiple areas of life.

The agenda for our May 27 forum is as follows:

Schedule (ET) 8:45 Introduction Michael Tiemann, Vice President, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat 9:00 Business Dr. David Upton, Chair of Operations Management, Oxford University 9:45 Government Karsten Gerloff, President, Free Software Foundation Europe;
Graham Taylor, Chief Executive, OpenForum Europe 10:30 15-MINUTE BREAK 10:45 Education Matt Jadud, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Allegheny College 11:30 Business Eugene Eric Kim, Cofounder and Principal, Blue Oxen Associates 12:15 15-MINUTE BREAK 12:30 Life Daniel James, Director, 64 Studio Ltd. 1:15 Life Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School; Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel 2:00 15-MINUTE BREAK 2:15 Business Michael Tiemann, Vice President, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat 3:00 Law Richard Fontana, Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel, Red Hat 3:45 15-MINUTE BREAK 4:00 Government Open Source for America
Panel featuring Jeremy Allison, Linux Evangelist, Google 4:45 Life Karsten Wade, Senior Community Architect, Red Hat

To register for the forum, visit here.

Reducing the sprawl common in many of today’s heterogeneous data centers is often top of mind for CIOs and IT departments. From identifying a process to increase hardware homogeneity and meeting application and environment migration targets to utilizing cost-effective virtualization technologies, Red Hat is primed and ready to help companies pave the way to success with Red Hat Services Pathways.

Pathways combine a series of strategic consulting engagements through a phased approach to help customers achieve specific IT business goals. We’re not just focused on the destination, we’ll also help map out the journey to get customers from where they’re at today to where they need to be in the future.

We’ll be rolling out a series of different Pathways over the next several months. Each Pathway is based on years of collective expertise and best practices, but can also be customized to meet unique characteristics and business objectives. This approach can help reduce risk while avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.

Without further ado, we’d like to introduce our first Red Hat Services Pathway: IT Consolidation.

The IT Consolidation Pathway can help address a number of pain points such as:

• Underutilized systems in some areas but over-utilized in others due to incompatible systems and applications
• Inefficiency of systems management tools and processes due to data center complexity
• Spending dedicated to maintaining complex, heterogeneous IT systems versus focusing on innovation

The IT Consolidation Pathway can help carve out IT costs while enabling customers to scale their IT ecosystem through an approach that leverages open source technologies, industry insight and proven IT methodologies.

Keep your eyes peeled for additional Pathways in the coming months as we continue to deliver services that enable our customers to follow the path to building and running efficient IT infrastructures.

This is the third post in our blog series highlighting cool features slated for Fedora 13. Our first spotlight looked at the enhancements in NetworkManager, and the second covered the innovations planned for Python developers. With this blog, we’re focusing on a feature that affects everyone, from the newest users exploring the rich environment of open source, to the most diehard developers of the Linux kernel: video drivers.

Manufacturers today produce a dizzying array of video hardware whose graphics processing power alone outstrips entire computer systems of just ten years ago. However, it’s not always been easy for Linux users to take advantage of this hardware. Until recently, the more exotic 3D acceleration features in particular have often required introducing closed source, proprietary drivers.

Closed source drivers make life more difficult for Linux uses. Since they are impossible for the community to debug or improve, it can be very frustrating when they cause work interruptions or system crashes. Following on the capabilities for the drivers for Intel and ATI based graphics cards, in Fedora 13, the Nouveau driver provides 3D hardware acceleration and is designed to support a wide array of NVidia based graphics cards. Because these drivers are fully free (as in freedom), open source software developers can build additional software against the functions they provide, taking fuller advantage of the hardware that users have purchased.

This support has already allowed Fedora developers to improve and accelerate the boot process and heighten the overall user experience in Fedora. But we believe that it also provides a solid platform for future capabilities of the open source desktop environment that can build on this complete open source software stack. For instance, the user’s desktop environment can take advantage of 3D acceleration to provide a richer and more elegant interaction model, as in the next-generation GNOME desktop. Users can also enjoy a variety of 3D games already packaged and freely available in the Fedora software repository.

In the video below, Colin Walters, a Red Hat software engineer, talks about the benefit of truly free video hardware drivers, and how users can take advantage of them now and in the future.

Free video drivers, though, are only part of the story of Fedora 13. There are numerous other enhancements involving hardware such as automatic print driver installation and a color management system for devices. The Fedora community has produced a set of detailed interviews on these features with the Fedora contributors who created them.

To see these features in action, download and try the Fedora 13 Beta pre-release, available here. The final release of Fedora 13 is currently scheduled for late May.

Download this video:[Ogg Theora]

Red Hat is springing into action in May! With a heavy focus on cloud computing this month, we have plenty of opportunities around the world to learn about Red Hat technologies. Be sure to tune into the “Unlock the Value of Cloud Computing” webinar, and to visit Red Hat’s “Empowering the Cloud Ecosystem” session at SAP Sapphire. Can’t get enough of Red Hat? Register for Red Hat Summit and JBoss World now! Early Bird special ends May 10!

Looking for information about Red Hat Summit and JBoss World? Click here.

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Red Hat invites you to “Unlock the Value of Cloud Computing” in a Webinar Thursday, May 27 at 2 p.m. EDT. In today’s challenging and competitive economic climate, companies are looking to raise infrastructure ROI, while decreasing cost and optimizing the use of existing IT resources. The cloud computing model is uniquely suited to help organizations meet current and future, often unpredictable business requirements. Please join us to learn how Red Hat can support your cloud computing efforts. Register here.

Opensource.com presents “Open Your World” on Thursday, May 27. “Open Your World” is an online forum highlighting the open source ideals of participation, collaboration, community, transparency and meritocracy as they are applied beyond the technology industry. The forum will be hosted by Michael Tiemann, vice president, Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, and will include presentations from a variety of industries including Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School; Open Source for America; Free Software Foundation Europe and Wikimedia Foundation, among others. To register for this free event, please visit here.

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Calling all RHCE’s! Take advantage of your certified status and join Red Hat in an RHCE-only RHCE Loopback May 13, 2010 in Austin, TX. Get together, share tips and technical tricks, discuss new technologies, and hear from experts on current and future industry trends. Register here.

Red Hat is a Diamond Sponsor at SAP Sapphire, May 16-19, 2010 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Red Hat will be at booth 501, and Red Hat director of product strategy and cloud computing Mike Ferris will deliver “Empowering the Cloud Ecosystem” on the Partner Track. For more info and to register, click here.

Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware is featured in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O, May 19-20, 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information, click here.

Red Hat will be sponsoring the CIO Executive Leadership Roundtable, May 21 in Chicago, IL. We will be located in booth 9, and Red Hat’s own Jan Mark Holzer will be a part of the Emerging Technologies Panel. For more information, click here.

Red Hat is sponsoring DoDIIs 2010, May 23-27 in Phoenix, AZ. Stop by booth 503 to speak with Red Hat solution architects about our latest offerings. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

The third annual Red Hat & JBoss Partner Summit, one of the premier open source technology partner conferences, will be arriving in Valencia, May 2-5, 2010. This year’s Partner Summit will strongly focus on the ecosystem and collaboration. Register now here.

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

Red Hat will be at AusCERT, May 16-21 at Gold Coast, QLD, Australia. Come and visit Red Hat at booth number B8 at AusCERT, the premier IT security event for IT security professionals in Australia and across the region. We’ll be showcasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux), the Linux distro with the highest level of out-of-the-box security in the industry, plus greatly simplified security administration and support for MLS (Multi Level Security) policies. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.
Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

When Red Hat announces a new major Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, such as with the recent Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, invariably among the first questions asked is, “What is the kernel version number?” The answer to this question is never a simple one-number reply. The construction of an enterprise-caliber kernel is an extremely complex exercise that requires close evaluation of hundreds of individual features and interactions. This blog outlines how we create our Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernels.

Because Red Hat is the leading contributor to the Linux kernel, we always have a large number of development initiatives in progress. Some initiatives span many years in a continuum of enhancements — a key example being the realtime latency enhancements that we have been developing over many kernel versions. So a complete feature may be delivered in stages over several releases, or perhaps delivered all at once when development is finally completed. Additionally, in any upstream kernel release, there will be some features that are production-ready, and others that are still a work in progress. The key balance we endeavor to strike when constructing an enterprise-focused kernel is to:

• Include mature enterprise features
• Include latent enablers in anticipation of future advances, such as scalability accommodations for hardware systems, that may not be delivered for several years
• Disable components that are not enterprise relevant, or not mature enough to be considered production-ready for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments

We believe that Red Hat’s leadership in kernel development and our large customer and partner community makes us uniquely positioned to sort out which features are ready for production support from Red Hat and which are not. Among many evaluation factors, we closely review our practical testing experience of various upstream kernel features. In fact, there are cases where we are not the first to productize our own development initiatives — when it comes to enterprise deployments, doing it right, not first, is our primary goal.

Taking into consideration all the above factors, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel is not a straightforward inheritance of a single upstream kernel version.

At the time of this blog posting, the latest upstream kernel version that is close to completion is 2.6.34. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel includes numerous subsystems and enhancements from 2.6.34, as well as its predecessor versions. As a result, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel cannot be simply labeled as any particular upstream version. Rather, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel is a hybrid of the latest several kernel versions. And, as Red Hat provides regular updates over the lifecycle of the product, we expect that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel will incorporate selected features from future upstream kernels that have yet to be developed.

Another important part of the construction of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel is a commitment to preserve ABI (application binary interface) compatibility, on two distinct levels.

• Firstly, at the system call level: the interface used by libraries and applications – which is crucial in preserving application compatibility and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ISV ecosystem.
• Secondly, at the kernel ABI level: used by third-party device drivers and kernel code.

To help hold these ABIs consistent for the full life of the product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux implements structural modifications. These allow for the later incorporation of features that would otherwise have been precluded, without perturbing the existing ABI.

This process is not new. Red Hat has been issuing enhancements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux during the Production I phase of the lifecycle. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, released in 2005, included new hardware support through 2009 and continues to be supported through 2012. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 launched in March 2007, will continue to receive hardware enhancements through 2011 and will be supported until 2014. Of course, within a given release’s maintenance stream, stability is the key acceptance criteria when we consider adding new kernel features. So in cases where we consider a new feature to be too risky or invasive to introduce into a maintenance update, it becomes one of the factors that triggers the introduction of a new major kernel version, such as the kernel in the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 release.

The following list gives a taste of just a few of the many kernel enhancements that were not practical to deliver in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 maintenance stream, so are under consideration for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6:

• Cgroups (Control Groups). Cgroups provide a fine-grained means of setting policy for process resource consumption, covering IO, memory, and CPU utilization. This is particularly useful to establish control policies on virtualized guests, providing a means of enforcing per-guest SLAs.
• Realtime determinism enhancements. The benefits of many of the advances in timer precision and runtime predictability that were first introduced in the Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime product are now expected to be provided as standard capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. These are particularly useful for time-sensitive environments, such as those supported by trading and high-speed messaging applications. Red Hat Enterprise MRG will also continue to be provided as a standalone product, offering additional determinism capabilities.
• Power management. Of several features that improve power management, perhaps the most important is called the “tickless” kernel. This reduces the traditional requirement for the hardware clock to interrupt the operating system (typically 1,000 times per second) in order to maintain accurate system and event timing. When processing requirements allow, the clock interrupt rate can be reduced dramatically, thereby allowing processors to enter low power states when idle.
• Virtualization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides virtualized guests with numerous I/O and memory optimizations, and enhanced support for virtualized hardware devices. These allow guests to directly access I/O devices, bypassing hypervisor overhead. This support also includes improved access to large memory pages, which are particularly useful for enabling high-performance virtualized database deployments. This continues our initiative to seamlessly allow all workloads to benefit from the flexibility provided by virtualization while minimizing overhead.
• KSM (Kernel Shared Memory). This feature allows condensing of duplicate pages into a single page. It is particularly useful among virtualized guests, which may, for example, be running the same operating system, and so have many identical memory pages. It is useful for Windows guests as they initialize their full range of memory with zeros at system startup, thereby needlessly consuming unused memory.
• KMS (Kernel Mode Setting). The Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel is used in both server and client environments, so enhancements to the graphics subsystem are of great importance. The new KMS feature provides numerous performance optimizations, as well as improving the appearance of system startup so, for example, it cleanly transitions to the login screen. KMS also enhances the ability to support multiple monitors, projectors, docking stations and suspend/resume.
• Scalability. A number of kernel enhancements that are under consideration allow Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to optimally support the latest generation of large memory and multi-CPU configurations — and to have headroom to grow for many years to come.

This list highlights just a few of the many new features that we expect to debut in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel.

In addition to the kernel work completed by Red Hat engineers, we also work hand-in-hand with engineers from our close partners. There is a continuum of features that we continue to mature for appearance in forthcoming maintenance releases, such as 6.1, 6.2 etc., as well as bigger features targeted for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is available for public download here.

This is the second post in our blog series highlighting some of the cool features slated for Fedora 13. Our first spotlight feature focused on improvements in NetworkManager. This second post dives into several new and innovative features planned for Fedora 13 that we believe will be useful to Python developers of all levels. Early in the development cycle, Fedora engineering team member and contributor David Malcolm started working on more intelligent tracing and debugging features that solve some common difficulties. This work serves as an example of how Fedora leads by solving technical problems through the power of open source.

The release of Fedora 12 included SystemTap 1.0, a tracing utility that allows developers to instrument code, to see how its flow corresponds to various system activities such as reading from devices, or consulting bits of memory. You can read more about SystemTap in this interview with Will Cohen, a tools engineer at Red Hat. In that interview, which was conducted for the release of Fedora 12, Will mentions that he expected SystemTap to evolve beyond the Linux kernel to include higher-level user applications. In Fedora 13, we plan to include static probes, which application developers can use to understand how their code is interacting with system resources.

SystemTap includes its own scripting language, and David Malcolm used this capability to develop a Python-based “top” function, to show Python activity across the entire running system. But beyond that, he also created an additional script that developers can use to see their applications calling and returning from individual Python functions. The combination of these tools in Fedora 13 can give developers immediate insight not only into their program’s flow, but also into how their application spends its time, and where bottlenecks might be occurring.

But that’s not all. We anticipate that Fedora 13 also will include a new feature for integrated debugging of Python and C/C++ libraries using the GNU debugger (gdb). The Python programming language is simple, readable, and powerful, but it is not as fast as those that are compiled into pure machine code. Programmers often use Python with compiled libraries written in C or C++ language to enhance speed. However, in the past this made debugging more difficult as a program would wind its way in and out of the different kinds of code. In Fedora 13, though, the GNU debugger can provide information needed to debug both the interpreted and the compiled code, making the developer more effective at identifying and squashing bugs.

To watch David Malcolm explain some of these features, and give an on-screen demonstration of how they work, check out the video below on Python in Fedora 13. You can also read a Fedora community interview and information page about Python in Fedora 13 here.

And to see these features in action, you can try out the Fedora 13 Beta pre-release, which is available here. The final release of Fedora 13 is expected to be available in mid-May. Look for additional blogs in the coming weeks highlighting other cool features slated for Fedora 13.

Download this video:[Ogg Theora]

Last week we hosted Middleware2020: A Virtual Forum on the Future of Middleware and we invite you to view the full replay of the forum by going to http://www.redhat.com/middleware2020. From the positive response we had from hosting the forum, middleware seems to be on the top of everyone’s mind.

IT departments that already have deployed, or are looking to deploy middleware solutions want to know how the leading vendors and developers see the technology developing over the next ten years. This was the question that the virtual forum set out to discuss. Through presentations from leaders at Accenture, Adobe, The Eclipse Foundation, Google, HP and Red Hat; we attempted to bring a diverse set of thought leaders together to spark a larger conversation on this topic; consistent with our belief that the innovation that will shape the next ten years is beyond the reach of any one company, but rather will be created by people working together.

Red Hat’s CTO and Vice President of Worldwide Engineering, Brian Stevens moderated the day-long conference and remarked on the reach and rapid innovation curve of middleware technologies, and Red Hat’s Sr. Director for Middleware Engineering, Dr. Mark Little offered an insightful briefing on the intersection of middleware and cloud computing. To hear Mark’s full presentation click here, http://www.redhat.com/middleware2020.

The large and diverse audience that tuned into our virtual forum gave us an idea about how the marketplace as a whole rates the importance of this topic. There were participants from as far away as South Africa and Saudi Arabia, Peru and Finland and virtually everywhere in between. Across the globe we see companies interested in the future direction of middleware technologies and how it can strategically help them scale their business to meet the demands of the global economy.

Just as we saw interest in this topic across a diverse set of regions, Middleware2020 drew participants from a diverse set of industries, including banking, investment firms, large global retail chains, telecommunications providers, travel booking services, health care and insurance, government entities, mobile device manufacturers, aerospace engineering and appliance manufacturers—just to name a few.

One thing that seems apparent to us is that as a topic set, middleware continues to gain interest as more and more companies take advantage of these technologies to help drive their businesses forward, scale up and create additional value for their customers. Join us as we continue to spark the conversation around this topic by viewing presentations from the forum at http://www.redhat.com/middleware2020, and stay tuned for future virtual forums on middleware.

To learn more about JBoss Enterprise Middleware and to hear from more leaders and customers join us at the Red Hat Summit & JBoss World at the Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center in Boston, June 22-25, 2010. Click here to subscribe to our business newsletter and stay up-to-date on the latest JBoss Enterprise Middleware developments.

We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today’s Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners and members of the public to install, test and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.

It has been almost eight years since the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since then, the product has established itself as one of the leading enterprise-caliber, open source operating systems. With installed systems in use from laptops to mainframes, it has helped set standards for quality, certified infrastructure, long-haul stability, performance and security. From Main Street to Wall Street, Red Hat Enterprise Linux touches almost every industry.

As Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 enters Beta today, the currently supported release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, continues to be the cornerstone of Red Hat’s software product portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was first released in March 2007, and has received regular updates since that time. Just last month, we delivered the fifth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform with new features and hardware support. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform will continue to be supported by Red Hat and its ISV and OEM partners until 2014.

Looking to the future, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 blurs the lines between virtual, physical and cloud computing to address shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Featuring updated core technology, from the kernel to the application infrastructure to the development toolchain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to meet the needs of the coming generations of hardware and software technologies.

The major themes of the release include pervasive virtualization, improved scalability and availability, increased power efficiency, and delivery of some of the latest software technologies. In line with today’s Beta availability, we’ll briefly highlight a few of the new and noteworthy improvements:

• Comprehensive power management capabilities
  Time-keeping improvements within the kernel allow the system to transition processors that do not have active tasks into the idle state more frequently. This leads to cooler CPUs and greater power savings compared to previous releases. New monitoring tools like powertop are designed to help pin-point power consumption issues that can be resolved in order to further reduce power consumption. New tuning tools like “tuned,” which is an adaptive system tuning daemon, allow the system to adjust power consumption based on analysis of service usage patterns.
• Performance enhancements
  Red Hat engineers have played key roles in the upstream development of a wide range of kernel performance enhancements that we plan to feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. This includes a complete rewrite of the process scheduler so that it more fairly shares compute cycles among processes and provides more determinism by enabling higher-priority processes to run with minimal interference from lower-priority processes. Additionally, there are a substantial range of multi-processor lock synchronization enhancements. For example, elimination of unnecessary locking occurrences, replacement of many spin locks with sleep locks and implementation of more efficient locking primitives. These foundational changes impact a number of kernel subsystems.
• Scalability enhancements
  Recent hardware launches have resulted in significant growth in commodity computing platforms. For example it is now possible to have 64 CPUs and 2TB of memory in a 5U rackmount form factor. These systems and their successors are approaching the scalability limits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. A primary feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is that it is designed to provide the scalability to handle systems well into the future. Capabilities range from optimized support for large CPU counts and memory configurations to the ability to handle an increased number of system-interconnect buses and peripherals. These capabilities are appropriate for both bare metal and virtualized environments as virtualization becomes as pervasive as bare metal deployments.
• New security features
  A new service called the System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) provides central management of identities. It also has the ability to cache credentials for offline use. The new SELinux sandbox feature allows execution of untrusted content in an isolated environment designed not to impact the rest of the system. This includes the ability to isolate any virtualized guest running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
• Resource management
  Fine-grained control, allocation and management of hardware resources is available with the help of a new framework called Control Groups or cgroups. cgroups work at the process group level and can be used to manage resources ranging from CPU, memory, network and disk I/O for applications. This framework is also used to manage virtual guests.
• Virtualization
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 builds on the integrated KVM-based virtualization provided by earlier Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. Incorporating numerous performance, scheduler and hardware support enhancements, it offers improved flexibility and control regardless of the deployment model.
• Storage
  Support for network block storage via FCoE and iSCSI protocols make it possible to perform online re-size of mirrored and multipath volumes using LVM/DM.
• File system
  This release includes the ext4 file system. As the next generation of the extended filesystem family, it includes support for larger file sizes, more efficient allocation of disk space, better file system checking and more robust journaling. In addition to ext4, the XFS® filesystem is also expected to be available. XFS® is well suited for extremely large file and directory sizes and includes features such as the ability to defragment and re-size the filesystem while active. NFS has been updated to version 4, which includes support for IPv6.
• Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS)
  This release leverages new hardware capabilities to offer features such as hot-add of devices and memory, and enhanced error checking for PCIe devices via AER. It also is expected to include advanced data integrity features (DIF/DIX) that validate data from application to platter via hardware checksums. The introduction of ABRT (Automated Bug Reporting Tool) provides a more consistent way to identify and report system exception conditions like kernel failures (kernel oops) and userspace application crashes.
• Compiler and tools
  The GCC compiler has been updated to version 4.4. This version complies with the C++ 0x standard draft. It also conforms to OpenMP 3.0 and includes many debugging capabilities. SystemTap improvements include better support for user-space probing, a more secure script-compile server and a new unprivileged mode that allows non-root users to access SystemTap. Additionally, there are many other libraries that have been updated to the latest versions, as well as additional languages and runtime environments, including the complete LAMP stack and OpenJDK.
• Desktop
  This release introduces automatic detection of display types and support for multiple displays. We have also included updated nouveau drivers to support NVIDIA graphics devices. Of course, no release would be complete without significant updates to the GNOME and KDE desktops.

The portfolio of technologies in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be offered along with expanded support for key hardware platforms, which we believe makes the release a compelling choice for new and existing customers alike. As always, part of the value of the subscription lies within our enterprise certifications. Currently, thousands applications are certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whether it’s on “bare metal,” virtualized or within cloud deployments. This makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux an operating system of choice for customers and partners.

If you are interested in trying the Beta, we encourage you to download and install it and share your feedback with us. Please visit here to access the Beta.

In keeping with Red Hat’s open source roots, we would like to recognize and thank our many partners and upstream community members who have been working closely with us for many months to make this release truly ground-breaking.

As with previous Fedora releases, we’ll once again be highlighting some of the new and improved features in a series of blogs leading up to our latest release, Fedora 13, anticipated in mid-May. First up on our list is NetworkManager.

NetworkManager is used by most modern Linux distributions – not just Fedora – to help users get online quickly and easily. But did you know that NetworkManager was created by a Red Hat engineer? And that it got its start in Fedora?

NetworkManager started in 2005 as the brainchild of Red Hat developer Dan Williams, as his answer to the challenge of making networking in Linux simple and painless for users. NetworkManager rapidly grew from primarily being a wireless helper into a full-featured solution that was still simple and elegant enough to meet the needs of desktop users. This evolution happened as a result of the Fedora community embracing this new idea and helping to nurture it through a process of testing and refinement. Fedora’s success as a community-powered R&D lab for new ideas has resulted in many technologies that are essential parts of the modern Linux desktop, NetworkManager being just one example.

As a result of these rapid iterations and resulting momentum, NetworkManager is used in most major distributions today, including Fedora. Users of Fedora 13 will be able to experience some of the newest features in NetworkManager 0.8.1, including:

• Bluetooth dial-up networking (DUN), which allows connections through older style Bluetooth phones that don’t support newer personal area networking (PAN)
• Mobile broadband status, which gives users a readout of signal strength and roaming before they connect

You can read much more about NetworkManager and its creator here on the Fedora wiki. And to see these features in action, you can try out the Fedora 13 Beta pre-release, which is available here. The final release of Fedora 13 is scheduled for mid-May. Keep your eyes peeled for additional blogs highlighting other cool features slated for Fedora 13.

The Beta release of Fedora 13 (codename “Goddard”) blasts off today, true to its namesake, scientist and liquid-fueled rocketry pioneer Robert Hutchings Goddard. The Fedora 13 Beta release gives an early peek at open source technologies that reach new heights of functionality and usability. The Beta milestone is when the Fedora Project encourages users, developers, and administrators of all types to download and try out the release early. While generally the Beta is reasonably stable, this is the time for users to exercise their favorite parts of the system and report any lingering bugs before the final release. The available Live images make it easy to try out Fedora – if you write one to a USB key, you can even add personal data and your favorite applications as you go. Here are some of the changes that are propelling the Fedora 13 Beta:

• Throughout the last several releases of Fedora, it’s been our goal to automate some of the hardware and software enablements that help users get their work done with a minimal amount of fuss. When the user plugs in a USB or parallel printer, inserts a specialized CD such as collections of music files as opposed to a standard audio CD, or downloads or opens an archive file, using powerful back end desktop technologies, PackageKit is designed to detect the user’s action and offer to install software helpers. With free and open source software, there is no artificial scarcity of software, and no need for the user to buy expensive upgrades for basic, expected functionality.
• We expect software developers will continue to find Fedora an optimal platform for development, especially with some of the new features found in Fedora 13 Beta. Python is one of the most popular and powerful programming languages in the world because of its shallow learning curve, readable syntax, wide-ranging libraries of useful functions, performance, and scalability. The Fedora 13 Beta allows developers to install and try a parallel-installable Python 3 stack for the first time. This feature allows developers to write and test code using either the current Python 2.6 or the next-generation Python 3 language, to optimize their work for the future.
• In addition, there are new functions in Fedora 13 Beta for the GNU debugger, gdb, that allow it to deliver unified information for C/C++ libraries and Python in the same running process. Programmers who are writing Python code that wraps or calls C/C++ functions to enhance performance and rapid development can now more quickly and efficiently detect and debug problems in their code using this work. Fedora contributors did a substantial work on this feature. As part of the Fedora practice of being good citizens in the open source ecosystem, it has been contributed upstream where it will later become part of other platforms as well. And when combined with applications like Eclipse, we believe that programmers will have a premier development environment where they can turn the next generation of open source ideas into code.
• System administrators can also try out some of the advanced file system improvements in Fedora 13 Beta. New features in the btrfs file system allow for rollbacks of entire file system states, making application testing and system recovery more powerful than ever. Using this next-generation file system is easier than ever with the improvements in the Anaconda installer, which sports more comprehensible interface options, including choices for advanced storage types.
• During its development cycle, Fedora 13 also featured for the first time an installable package of Zarafa, a drop-in groupware replacement for Exchange with full featured email, calendaring, and other collaboration tools for use by both Linux and Microsoft clients. A highly usable, comfortable, and familiar Web interface for users, and support for POP/IMAP and other protocols are included, along with tools for integration with existing Linux services.

These are just a few of the enhancements, improvements, and brand-new features found in the Fedora 13 Beta. To launch your own journey and discover the latest and greatest free Fedora software, visit http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease and download a copy of Fedora 13 Beta. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available, as well as links to getting involved in the Fedora community, and helpful support information.