RHEL7 and Oracle Linux 7 beta

Nearly two weeks ago, Oracle announced the Oracle Linux 7 Beta 1. Being the Linux fanboy I am, I downloaded it straight away from here.

Oracle Linux is a clone of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. The RHEL7 beta, and therefore OL7 beta, distro is based on a cut of Fedora 19, although depending on who you ask, it’s possibly more a mix of Fedora 18, 19 and 20… Suffice to say, there are a lot of changes compared to the RHEL6/OL6 distribution.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, my desktop at home is running Fedora 20, so I’m pretty used to most of the changes, but I’ve not written much about them, apart from the odd blog post. It’s not a high priority for me, since I’m not a sysadmin, but I’ll be updating/rewriting a few of the Linux articles on the site to include the new stuff.

When Surachart Opun mentioned having to look at systemd and firewalld, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to update my firewall and services articles. You can see the new versions here.

RHEL7/OL7 is only in beta, and even after the production release I’m sure it will be a long time before Oracle actually certify any products against it, but if you are not a Fedora user, it’s probably worth you having a play around with this stuff.

Cheers

Tim…