With its ongoing Virtual Summit 2020, the Red Hat team has finally announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2. The new version comes with new enhancements and high-end user experience for both regular users and developers.
RHEL 8.2: What’s New
As most of the changes already revealed in RHEL 8.2 Beta, let’s see the overall new improvements in RHEL 8.2.
Streamlined Management, Installation, And Upgrades
To ease the registration process, RHEL 8.2 now includes subscription registration in the installation process. Furthermore, you can also enable Red Hat Insights during installation to initiate the monitoring right after the install completion.
If you’re using the old version of RHEL, you can now easily upgrade your system using the in-place upgrade tool. This helps to reduce the time and risk of in-place upgrades with identification and remediation guidance to resolve potential problems.
Security Customization
RHEL 8.2 adds setools-gui and setools-console-analyses packages for SELinux-policy analysis and data-flow inspections. Administrators can also customize system-wide cryptographic policies with updated crypto-policies. This results in improved security for containerized workloads with customized SELinux policies.
Web Console Login
Red Hat 8.2 redesigns the web console with the option to log in and configure it using a TLS client certificate. This aims to strengthen the authentication system and restrict any authorized entry.
RHEL web console also includes an auto-logout from the current session after 15 minutes of inactivity. It displays the content of banner files on the login screen, which you can also configure.
Enhanced Developer Support And Toolset
To arm the developers with tons of tools, v8.2 upgrades open-source tools such as GCC Toolset 9.1, Python 3.8, Maven 3.6 to its latest versions. Developers can grab the latest tools from Application Streams (a concept introduced in RHEL 8 series).
Development environments including OpenJDK and .Net 3.1 in Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) have also been improved along with base images. Hence, the dev team can now take advantage of creating applications for cloud-native environments.
If you want to dig deeper into the new features and capabilities of RHEL 8.2, I would suggest you read the official release notes here.
Or, if you want to access RHEL 8.2, get a valid subscription from Red Hat Customer Portal or sign-up for a no-cost Developer Subscription.
