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Novell and Red Hat have upgraded their Linux offerings. Novell released SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2) while Red Hat shipped Version 5.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both upgrades include improvements at the desktop and server level. They include networking enhancements, virtualization additions, and improvements in hardware support. Here's what you'll find under the hood.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 reaches out to Windows users in several ways. It supports migration of Windows users across machines, and offers support for virtualized Windows Server 2008 and 2003 instances. . With Service Pack 2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 becomes a Xen-based virtualization solution (Xen 3.2), and offers a virtual machine management tool that provides a summary of all live domains, in addition to graphical views of the performance of virtual machines (including historical views of performance). There are also a number of availability and scalability enhancements.

Novell also has a number of desktop enhancements in SP2. Local NTFS file system support offers more compatibility with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, plus better integration with Microsoft Active Directory. Desktop users also get plug-and-play support for wireless broadband, including UMTS and 3G support, and broader hardware support--which users have really been calling for.

Red Hat's second upgrade to Enterprise Linux 5 includes many bug fixes, a lot of support for more hardware, and new features that have been backported from outside open source projects. According to Red Hat, improvements concentrate on six areas:

• Virtualization
• Laptop and Desktop improvements
• Encryption and Security
• Cluster & Storage Enhancements
• Networking & IPv6 Enablement
• Serviceability

Version 5.2 provides improved virtualization support for larger system configurations. This includes enhanced virtualization support for NUMA-based architectures. Also, physical CPU support has been increased to 64 CPUs per system, and memory support to 512 GB per system.

On the desktop, users of Red Hat's version 5.2 can find new applications, including Evolution 2.123, Firefox 3, OpenOffice 2.30, and Thunderbird 2.0 (e-mail client from Mozilla). You can find a complete list of enhancement in the Release Notes.

Have you tried these new releases?

• linux
• SUSE Linux Enterprise
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux