0 
0 Oracle Enterprise Linux is now available from the Oracle unbreakable 2 program and ISO’s can be downloaded for free – see Sergio’s blog here: http://www.orablogs.com/sergio/archives/001838.html. I heared from Dimitri Gielis on the OOW2006 that Sergio switched from the APEX team to the new linux team.
The ISO’s are based on the RedHat distributions sets but stripped from all the labels. As add-on you now can get your support from Oracle as described on linux.oracle.com and http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/index.html, or for starters info look here: https://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=1386.
ISO’s are available for the 32 bit and 64 bit Linux hardware environments. Both sets are "update 4" (unsure if they were build via RedHat AS or ES versions?). RedHat EL 32 has update 8 as it’s last distro. All in all – interesting stuff.
Update:
I extracted the ISO’s and they are called R4-U4-I386-diskx (where x is 1..4), so I guess it is save to assume that they were based on RedHat 4.
They hardly bothered to change the filenames!
I hope they did a bit more on optimizing the sourcecode for Oracle and not just a find-and-replace on the Red Hat logo.
Surely what Oracle is offering is a distro – Centos and Whitebox do the same (less in fact, they only rebadge and compile binaries, Oracle are adding bugfixes) and we call these distros; regardless of what Oracle are saying, this is an Oracle Linux distro, albeit one that aims to provide binary compatibility with Red Hat.
Lots of buzz and differring opinions on this one. Is an Oracle-supported RH still RH? In all likelihood, no as the Oracle-supported version will not have any of the RH logos and non-open-sourced components.
If a RH customer switch their support to Oracle, then that RH-install is no longer RH-certified (especially after Oracle provided a patch to patch the OS) so I guess conceptually Oracle is actually doing their own Linux distros although they are copying from RH instead.
It would be interesting to see how many customers will actually switched and also the number of RH/Oracle clients compared to RH only clients.