By Michael Hall, LinuxToday
Red Hat has announced the availability of the Beta version of Red Hat Linux for Itanium-based systems. This is the first publicly available beta from Red Hat for the Itanium architecture and is available for public download at Red Hat’s ftp site: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/ia64
Red Hat says the distribution is based on a pre-production release of the 2.4 Linux kernel. The distribution includes over 700 packages, including databases and utilities. The main thrust of the effort, according to the company, is to provide a suitable platform for mission-critical applications and technical computing environments such as OLTP, data warehousing and finite element analysis.
Red Hat is operating a “Jumpstart program” to provide support, training and developer information for the distribution. More about the program can be obtained at http://www.redhat.com/products/IA64/Jumpstart