Red Hat has finally trotted out the long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4), its commercial version of the Linux 2.6 kernel, calling it "a defining milestone in the evolution of Linux as the backbone of the enterprise." It's supposed to put Linux - and Red Hat - on a par with Unix in terms of reliability and ahead of it in terms of value. Red Hat claims its platform is tested (slap in the face to Novell) and includes productivity improvements for the desktop.

The widgetry works on 64-bit Xeon and Itanium, AMD64, Power and IBM mainframes.

Red Hat says "hundreds" of applications are in the certification process and 750 boxes have been certified. RHEL 4 is available in 15 languages.

Red Hat has spent its career rustling Sun's cattle and now the little vixen says it plans to extend the functionality of the Red Hat Network provisioning system to manage software distribution and configuration of systems running Solaris.

It says the cross-platform support will ease the transition from Solaris to Red Hat.

It's proposing it as a single unified system, promising to save time, money and administrative costs - and, of course, clean Sun's clock.

Red Hat said it expects the module to be available on a subscription basis at the end of Q2