RHEL 5 is released today

Tonight, I read a review by Linux Format , the best-selling Linux magazine in the UK. The review is done for the latest RHEL 5 (Redhat Enterprise 5) which is released today. Technology enhancements are welcomed, such as those in SELinux administration and full integration of Xen virtualization as expected from Fedora Core 6.  The review also included an Q/A interview with Nick Carr, general manager, RHEL.

More noteworthy is that, Redhat Inc., as a company, has revamped its support, marketing, customer relation plan, and its relationship with the open source community. As stated in the review, the company has realigned the whole company to work better with the open source community as well as their enterprise customers. 

• The one page SLA
• server/client flavor versus the traditional WS/ES/AS flavors for RHEL3 and RHEL4.

first impression of Bestpractical's RT, an open source ticketing system

I heard quite a bit of good things about RT, an open source ticketing system.  Here is the first impression I had after retrieving the source tarball off bestpractical.com's web site.

The current stable version is 3.6.1.

Per README in the source tarball,

• "RT is an enterprise-grade issue tracking system. It allows organizations to keep track of what needs to get done, who is working on which tasks, what's already been done, and when tasks were (or weren't) completed."
• GPLv2
• commercial support is available including training and such: sales@bestpractical.com .
  

The installation seems a little too involving, even for a professional UNIX/linux system engineer.

• it requires Perl >5.8.3 with a lot of CPAN modules. To the developer's credit, a RT util tool is built to help get CPAN modules and compile them in place.
  
• It support a few RDBMS as its backend: MySQL/Postgres/Oracle/SQLite
• Apache with mod_perl (or FastCGI)