Installing Red Hat Linux

Red Hat is just one of a number of Linux distributions. Since the Linux kernel software operates under a free software licensing called the GNU General Public License, companies like Red Hat are able to take the Linux kernel and add their own proprietary software code to create their own particular flavor of Linux.

Red Hat, Inc. provides both freeware versions and commercial versions (which you have to pay for) of their Linux distribution. The free version (which can be downloaded from Linux distribution sites such as www.linuxiso.org), provides a basic form of the operating system. Although we look at a free distribution of Red Hat in this chapter (Red Hat 8), network administrators intent on deploying Linux servers for hosting Web sites, network shares, and specialized client/server environments would definitely want to purchase commercial Red Hat Linux distributions that have been designed for enterprise networking.