June 10, 2009, 12:54 pm
Red Hat Inc is a publicly listed company and one of the largest players open source sector. They sell support and services for their open source technology, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL is built on the community driven Linux distribution called Fedora, which the company sponsors. It is one of the most popular Linux distributions, claiming to have at least 10 million users.
Fedora is a binary distribution which uses the RPM Package Manager for its binary package system. The binary packages themselves are in this format, but RPM is also a manager, able to install, remove and manage these files. RPM has been around for a long time and is part of the Linux Standard Base. Many other distributions such as Mandriva and openSUSE use this as their primary package management, while distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu use the Deb package format. Debs themselves are very similar to RPM‚Äôs but the programs which manage them are very different…
