Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. With this latest update, subscribers can achieve greater return on their IT investment with new hardware support capabilities, selected new software technologies and numerous quality improvements. And, the certified application environment provided by every Red Hat Enterprise Linux version means that subscribers enjoy the new capabilities provided in release updates without the need to recertify their applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 features enhanced capabilities in six major areas, including virtualization, desktop, security, clustering, networking and hardware support. Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of memory, is now possible. Virtualization support for NUMA-based architectures is provided, as well as security, performance, manageability and robustness improvements. CPU frequency scaling support for virtualized environments also allows for reduced power consumption.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 provides enhanced capabilities for several hardware architectures, covering x86/x86-64, Itanium, IBM POWER and IBM System z, which provide improved performance, power usage, scalability and manageability. For example, support for Intel's Dynamic Acceleration Technology permits power saving by quiescing idle CPU cores, and offers performance gains by potentially overclocking busy cores within safe thermal levels. Other hardware enhancements include extensive device driver updates, covering storage, network and graphics devices, and certification of IBM's new Cell Blade systems.

"With this announcement, Red Hat Enterprise Linux becomes a certified operating system for IBM's new high-performance blade server based on Cell Broadband Engine (TM) (Cell/B.E) Architecture," said Jim Comfort, vice president, Workload Optimized Systems for IBM Systems and Technology Group. "These systems can deliver dramatic performance results in client applications that include digital content creation, electronic design automation, image and signal processing, financial algorithms, scientific research and seismic processing."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Desktop includes enhanced support for laptop suspend/hibernate and resume, updated graphics drivers and a comprehensive update of desktop applications, including OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox v3, delivering a richer, more practical and easier-to-use desktop experience.

"We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2," said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coordinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. "Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms."

"LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops," said Werner Schmidt, LVM's CIO. "We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months."

While Red Hat provides individual software fixes when and if available, these fixes are also consolidated into every Red Hat Enterprise Linux update. This provides a convenient way for subscribers who do not install fixes individually to update their system in one single, easy step.

"Today's availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, with its many technology enhancements, reemphasizes the value that we offer to customers through our subscription model," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Enterprise Linux Business at Red Hat. "By delivering these enhancements Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to demonstrate its leadership in the field. These new capabilities should allow managers to extract more value out of their IT budget."