Red Hat will launch the latest version of its Linux distribution this week, according to US newswires and, in effect, according to Red Hat itself, which has organised a press tour to promote the new release. It probably feels it needs to hype up the release a bit, what with Corel getting closer to the release of its major mainstream-user oriented Linux distribution and the new version of Red Hat Linux being just a point upgrade, taking the software to version 6.1. The release will offer improvements to the installer, including the ability to gobble up bandwidth by pulling the latest versions of apps and utilities off the Web rather than the CD, extra network management tools and presumably the usual round of kernel upgrades and bug fixes. ®