Red Hat Releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Release Candidate to Select Partners at Red Hat Summit

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is released to select partners this week in a step toward the delivery of its general availability, expected to occur in the coming weeks. The Beta for this first update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was delivered to customers and the larger community in March and has since undergone extensive testing. Providing the Release Candidate to our partners is a critical, final check on hardware drivers and software features that will be provided in the general availability of the update release. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is among the few operating platforms in the industry that is broadly supported across server, storage and network hardware -- therefore, the Release Candidate update is distributed to a select set of hardware and software partners on a global basis.

Red Hat is well-known for our collaboration in the upstream community. We have a leadership position in hundreds of open source projects, ranging from the Linux kernel to the GNOME desktop. Our partners are also strong contributors to open source projects. The maturity, market acceptance and community support of Linux drives many IHVs, OEMs and ISVs to develop new functionality and enhance performance first in open source projects. Since there is no single source for these community projects, Red Hat engineering selects mature and stable code from community projects to be included in each major release and following update releases. The work to coordinate different projects can be as simple as selecting the mature code, or as complicated as merging overlapping code sets that were not developed together.

We celebrate the delivery of the Release Candidate for the first update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with our partners this week at the Red Hat Summit event taking place in Boston. During the event, there is an extensive lineup of keynotes, sessions and campgrounds featuring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its industry leadership.

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