How Red Hat just quietly, radically transformed enterprise server Linux

wellesenterprises/Getty Images Long before Linux was introduced, I worked as a Unix system administrator. In those days, I downloaded the source code, unpacked the tarball archive it arrived in, compiled it, and installed it whenever I needed to update my system or install a new package. It was a real pain in the rump. With the arrival of Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4) in 1989, things got better with the first package manager system: pkgadd, pkgrm, and pkginfo. Companies such as IBM, with its AIX Unix distribution and its System Management Interface Tool (SMIT), and Sun, with Solaris 2.0, released their own proprietary versions, and my sysadmin life got a lot easier. Also: How practical AI prevailed over hype at Red Hat Summit 2025 Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds, who had announced in 1991 that he was working on a (free) operating system ("just a hobby," he said, "won't be big and professional like gnu") for 386(486) AT clones, was happy to see people adopting Linux and taking it serious ... Read full article.