Fedora 12 Unites Latest Features and Usability Into Compelling Free Distribution.

Community of Contributors Continues to Grow

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 12 includes a robust feature set for desktop users, administrators, developers and open source enthusiasts alike. New enhancements available in Fedora 12 include next-generation Ogg Theora video, virtualization improvements and advancements to NetworkManager, among numerous others.

"Fedora always looks to include the latest cutting-edge features in its distribution and we believe that Fedora 12 stays true to this pattern, packing a lot of punch across its feature set," said Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. "Our community of global contributors continues to expand, with about 25 percent growth in Fedora Accounts since the release of Fedora 11. We've also seen more than 2.3 million1 installations of Fedora 11 thus far, which is a 20 percent increase over the previous release."

Notable feature enhancements in Fedora 12 are:

* Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, enhancing the quality of free video to better meet user expectations. Ogg Theora video in Fedora 12 delivers crisp, vibrant media, enabling users to stream and download high-definition video while using 100 percent free and open software, codecs and formats.

* Introduced in Fedora 7, NetworkManager has become the de facto network configuration solution for multiple distributions. Network Manager improvements in Fedora 12 make it easier for users to be online using mobile broadband, or configure servers or other special situations.

* Virtualization is an increasingly important part of IT infrastructures and the Fedora community has delivered a large number or virtualization-related features in Fedora 12 including better virtual disk performance and storage discovery, hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption, and a modern network booting infrastructure. These new, higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable and easy to manage solutions.

Other features in Fedora 12 are PackageKit command-line and browser plugins; better file compression to save disk space and time; libguestfs, which lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without booting those guests; SystemTap 1.0, with improvements to help developers trace and gather information for writing and debugging programs, as well as integration with the widely-used Eclipse IDE; and NetBeans 6.7.1. To learn more about all of the features in Fedora 12 please visit here.

Fedora aims to deliver a complete operating system approximately every six months. In just under one year's time, the Fedora community has released Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 which, when coupled together, deliver a very large and compelling feature set available for incorporation into other Linux distributions. Technologists looking to the future can preview functionality which may appear in future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in this release of Fedora.

The Fedora community is vibrant and continues to grow. In 2009, the community held fifteen Fedora Activity Day events across the globe. These are mini-conferences where Fedora experts gather to work on a specific set of tasks, ranging from developing new features and web applications, to showing new and existing contributors how to get involved in Fedora by working on simple tasks. During that same period the Fedora Project also held three Fedora Users and Developers Conferences (FUDCons) around the world, in Boston, Porto Alegre, and Berlin. Thanks to a focused effort by the community Ambassador leadership on mentoring, the Ambassador ranks continue to grow steadily, with almost 700 active members worldwide and Fedora 12 release parties planned around the world.

Watch the Fedora 12 release video here to learn more about new features and the Fedora community. There are also many Fedora 12 release events being held across the globe. To find an event near you where the Fedora Project will appear, please visit the Fedora Events calendar.

The next FUDCon is scheduled for Dec. 5-7, 2009, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For more information about FUDCon Toronto 2009, visit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Toronto_2009.

For more information about the Fedora Project, visit www.fedoraproject.org. For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations." In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

1 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

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