Red Hat and Novell Suse yesterday both announced updates to their enterprise Linux operating systems. Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2, which includes virtualisation, desktop, encryption and security updates. Suse Linux released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for its Suse Linux Enterprise 10 operating system.

Red Hat’s RHEL 5.2 comes 15 months after the release of RHEL5 in March last year. RHEL 5.2 now supports up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory in one system, up from the current maximum of eight CPUs, said Daniel Riek, the product manager for RHEL. Also new is virtualization support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)-based architectures, as well as features that deliver reduced power consumption.

RHEL 5.2 also includes certification and support for use with IBM’s new high-performance cell blade systems.

On the desktop RHEL 5.2 has better support for laptop suspend, hibernate and resume functions. It also includes updated graphics drivers and the latest versions of a wide range of open source desktop applications, including OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, according to Red Hat.

Suse

Suse’s SP2 includes a subscription management tool to help make it easier for system administrators to manage updates. The tool will allow administrators to distribute the updates at the same time for all desktop, server or point-of-sale systems that are running SP2, rather than having to run them separately for each system.

Better virtualisation support including for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 is also included.

On the network, Suse SP2 includes IPv6 support. On the desktop better interoperability with Microsoft Windows and Office using local NTFS file systems is promised.