Today we released the seventh update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, marking the point where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 enters the autumn of its life cycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now marching toward the Production 2 life cycle phase - formerly known as the “Transition” or “Deployment” phase. From this point forward, the amount of change introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 minor releases is decreasing constantly as Red Hat focuses its efforts on addressing continued stabilization of the release.

Aside from a broad range of fixes and refreshed hardware enablement, a number of key product enhancements were included in Enterprise Linux 4.7, among them:

• Upgrade to Firefox 3
• Support for SHA-256 / SHA-512 password encryption in order to meet government requirements
• Added the aide (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) package to allow file system integrity
  testing
• Systemtap production support
• Added tick divider capability, helping to avoid time-skew when running Enterprise Linux 4 as a fully virtualized guest on Enterprise Linux 5 or VMWare virtualization
• Added IPv6 support for iSCSI
• Numerous autofs improvements

As an effect of yesterday’s news on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle update, there will be one additional update for the Production 1 life cycle, formerly known as “Full Support”, phase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 is currently projected to be available in early 2009. Following Enterprise Linux 4.8, the release will enter the Production 2 life cycle phase.