Red Hat has released a beta version of the latest update to its Enterprise Linux OS, touting significant improvements to the desktop and virtualisation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is becoming increasingly popular and is one of the most commonly deployed open source distributions in businesses, along with Novell's SUSE.

RHEL version 5.2 will bring an upgraded Xen virtualisation hypervisor, better clustering capabilities and improved support for IPv6 which, using a DHCP version 6 client and server, should make the deployment of IPv6 addressing across entire networks much easier.

There are also big changes to the desktop, which will come with the latest versions of Firefox, OpenOffice and Thunderbird.

As it's still only a beta, Red Hat urges businesses not to run it on any production system. ®

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