“SuSE and RedHat are at it again: preparing to parachute a new
drop of their distros. SuSE said yesterday it will release 7.0 this
month, and RedHat has made a beta of what it calls the Pinstripe
release of Red Hat Linux 7.0 available for download.”
“SuSE has a thrice-yearly schedule, and RedHat updates every six
months or so, and this time round they’re roughly in sync. Both
produce versions for Alpha, PowerPC and SPARC alongside Intel
x86.”
“Whether these releases matters much to anyone other than SuSE
or RedHat – or the other folk who use one of these as the basis for
their own distros, such as Mandrake or SGI – we’re not quite sure.
As Linux systems are typically used for a specific function – for
example web serving, mail serving, graphics or as development
systems – then the big events in the calendar are releases of
Apache, the webserver and its allied caching or clustering add-ins,
or Sendmail, or XFree86, or Perl and Python respectively.”
“Some project milestones impact everyone of course, such as
the kernel itself, and the glib libraries, but since both the big
distros offer auto update features to roll these in as you go
along, then it’s obvious that the SuSE and RedHat milestones have
more to do with visibility and an indication of taste as much as
anything.“