Red Hat Linux 9 out soon

Red Hat users who subscribe to the Linux company’s Red Hat Network will get a sneak peek at Red Hat Linux 9 next week. The official release of the industry’s leading Linux distro is set for April 7.

Among the features of Red Hat Linux 9 is an update of the Bluecurve graphical interface, which sits on top of Linux and provides shortcuts to applications as well as file and directory organization. New versions of desktop environments such as KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.2 are also included.

It is being reported that Red Hat Linux 9 will be based on Version 2.4.2 and include new packages for adding features such as drag and drop printing, new font viewers and CD burning applications. For security, access control lists (ACL) support has been added to the ext3 file system, or journaling file system, for Red Hat Linux.

Also added is Native POSIX Thread Library – or NPTL – support. Red Hat says this will allow the software to multi-task better, especially when running Java applications that execute multiple background tasks simultaneously.

Some observers last week questioned Red Hat’s jump to Version 9, since Red Hat Linux 8.0 was just released in October 2002. According to Red Hat the boost in number version is due partly to the introduction of the NPTL support. The company says this major revision was enough to warrant the release of a new release number, particularly because the threading change could cause incompatibility with applications written for Red Hat Linux 8’s threading technology.