Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 -- a way bigger deal than you might think

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL).

The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

When it comes to the up-to-date applications, RHEL purposefully stays behind the curve so as not to break anything, especially on servers. But for desktop users, having to run Firefox 1.5 for-freakin'-ever is a bit of a bummer. Same for OpenOffice; the version I last used (probably in CentOS 4) didn't even have ODF compatibility.

Users of RHEL 5.2 will enjoy the following newish applications:

• Evolution 2.12.3
• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice 2.3.0
• Thunderbird 2.0

This is one of the parts of the release that makes me eager to try RHEL 5.2:

We also significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow us to certify more laptop systems.

Also, many graphics drivers where updated, including a backport of the "intel" graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Bottom line: These improvements make RHEL/CentOS much more attractive on the desktop (and especially for laptop users).

Could this mean a greater push from Red Hat on the desktop, even though the company has stated recently that it will not focus on that very market?

I say yes.

Red Hat 5.0 (OK, in my case the free CentOS 5.0) runs pretty damn well on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), except that Suspend/Resume doesn't work ... and if it did, I would be very happy about it.

The Red Hat release didn't mention the fact that RHEL didn't suffer from the same OpenSSH vulnerability that has affected Debian-derived Linux distros, but the CentOS team does point it out while also telling CentOS users to check suspect keys from users of Debian-based systems that have had SSH contact with your RHEL/CentOS box.