RED HAT

Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.

Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called "Red Hat Commercial Linux It was the first Linux distribution to use theRPM Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux andYellow Dog Linux.

Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on 2004-04-30, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007

Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.

Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties are required everywhere MP3 is patented.^{[citation needed]} Support for Microsoft's NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.