Red Hat Commercial Linux
What was the official name of Red Hat Linux from 1900 to 1995?
Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux , created by the company Red Hat , was a widely used Linux distribution until its discontinuation in 2004 . Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux . Red Hat published the first non-beta release in May 1995 . It was the first Linux distribution to use the RPM Package Manager as its packaging format , and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions , such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux . In 2003 , Red Hat discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) for enterprise environments . Fedora , developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat , is a free-of-cost alternative intended for home use . Red Hat Linux 9 , the final release , hit its official end-of-life on April 30 , 2004 , although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007 . Features . Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support ELF ( Executable and Linkable Format ) binaries instead of the older a.out format . Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda developed by Ketan Bagal , intended to be easy to use for novices , and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions . It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities . In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc 2.1 , egcs-1.2 , and to the 2.2 kernel . It also introduced Kudzu , a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware . Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel , although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel . Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92 , which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called 2.96 . The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95s bad performance on non-i386 platforms , especially DEC Alpha . Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++ standard , which caused much of the existing code not to compile . In particular , the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism , e.g . from Linus Torvalds and the GCC Steering Committee ; Red Hat was forced to defend their decision . GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel , and some other software used in Red Hat , due to stricter checks . It also had an incompatible C++ ABI with other compilers . The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel , called kgcc . As of Red Hat Linux 7.0 , UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system . This had little effect on English-speaking users , but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages , including ideographic , bi-directional , and complex script languages along with European languages . However , this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users , whose legacy ISO-8859–based setups were broken by the change . Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme . It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops , as well as OpenOffice-1.0 . KDE members did not appreciate the change , claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE . Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library , which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat . Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems . For example , MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS ; instead , Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis , which has no patents . MP3 support , however , could be installed afterwards , although royalties are required everywhere MP3 is patented . Support for Microsofts NTFS file system was also missing , but could be freely installed as well . Fedora . Red Hat Linux was originally developed exclusively inside Red Hat , with the only feedback from users coming through bug reports and contributions to the included software packages – not contributions to the distribution as such . This was changed in late 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged with the community-based Fedora Project . The new plan was to draw most of the codebase from Fedora when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions . Fedora replaced the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version . The model is similar to the relationship between Netscape Communicator and Mozilla , or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org , although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully free software . Version history . Release dates were drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce . Version names are chosen as to be cognitively related to the prior release , yet not related in the same way as the release before that . The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22 , 2003 .