Hi! Today, I will be discussing about red hat. It's not a girl's accesory item if you think it is! Red Hat is one of the many organisations that distributes Linux. You can call it Red Hat Inc. Red hat is a organisation that deal with free open-source software since 1995. Now, that is 13 years straight! It was first started by Marc Ewing when he first created his own Linux distro in 1994. It's the guy with the red hat like in the picture below.
A Noble Cause
One of the most famous projects by Red Hat Inc. is the one-laptop-per-child project, that aims to create an affordable educational IT device for use in schools in the third world countries like Ethiopia and Rwanda. Below is a picture of the logo of the OLPC (that is one-laptop-per-child) organisation and a picture of the laptop that is being distributed for this cause.
The laptop above runs with the Linux OS and uses flash memomry (that is your thumb drives) instead of hard drives. Since this laptop is low-powered and rugged, the taiwanese company, Quanta Computer decided Linux should be a good enough OS. As for networking, the mesh technology is used. Mesh? (That was the kind of question I raised as a computer science student when TWH first introduced that word. So you don't need to be ashammed). According to TWH, the aim of mesh technology is to provide internet access to remote villages from the cities. This kind of internet is slow but good enough for students in the villages to get a grasp at networking. It seems that small networking packets are placed vrom one village to another and the sequence of these packets enables internet from the big cities to be directed to villages also.
The Business Venture
Now, the OLPC was for a noble cause, let's look at what Red Hat does as its business venture. Red Hat sponsors Fedora 9. Fedora 9 is the latest release (or rather latest distro) of Linux from Red Hat. Below is a video of the project leader of Fedora 9 talking about this project.
So, in this entry, I talked about Red Hat, an enterprise that is dedicated to Free and Open-Source Software, especially Linux. If you asked me, while doing this blog and researching for the materials, I myself have taken an interest towards Linux and especially Fedora. In the upcoming entries, I will zoom into Fedora 9 and the 10.
Did you know? Before this blog, I knew nothing about Linux - as good as ground zero.
