Tips and tricks: How do I properly refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in documentation and when conversing with fellow users and customers?
by the editorial team
When referring to Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5, use the following:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop
If the version number is necessary for clarity choose one of these options:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop
If “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5″ is referred to multiple times in text, it would be appropriate to use “version 5″ in place of “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5″ after its first use.
When referring to Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 2.1, 3, or 4, use the following:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES
- Red Hat Desktop
For versions prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 and 3.9 (version.minor.z-stream), use the following forms:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Version 4 Update 3
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS Version 4 Update 4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Version 3 Update 8
- Red Hat Desktop Version 3 Update 7
or
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.4 Update 3
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS v.4 Update 4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v.3 Update 8
- Red Hat Desktop v.3 Update 7
For versions after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 and 3.9 (version.minor.z-stream), use the following forms:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 AS
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 WS
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.9 ES
- Red Hat 3.9 Desktop
It is never correct to abbreviate “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” as “RHEL”.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:39 am
thanks for the correct references. I advise you to reduce the title of this post. Why simply put :” How do i properly refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux products” …. You do not need to add ‘Tips and tricks’ in the header, we already know that your post is filed under this category.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:22 am
what’s the reason, why RHEL or RHEL5 is never correct? it’s the most obvious and most widespreaded abbreviation all over the world…
I mean, no linux/unix user in the world will use “blablabla, version blablabla”, when he is already creating an alias l=”ls -l” because “ls -l” is much too much to write…
:-p
February 5th, 2008 at 10:07 am
>It is never correct to abbreviate “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” as “RHEL”.
Its about 4 years to late to try and put that back in the bag, I would try to trademark that or something if I was you guys.
It will forever be known as RHEL, get over it.
Especially since if you type “RHEL” into google, the first 2 links are to redhat.com/rhel and the next one is to Wikipedia(redhat).
February 6th, 2008 at 1:55 am
i have to agree with noah and han solo. i’ve used “rhel” to refer to red hat enterprise linux, as do most people in my organization (a large .edu).
your “it is never correct…” statement seems absurd considering (as han solo mentioned), “rh” uses the same acronym in its url’s.
i’d also point out the title of the page at http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/notes/ and also that a google search for “rhel site:redhat.com” gives us “Results 1 - 10 of about 58,700 from redhat.com for rhel.”
seriously, just give up trying to get people to not use “rhel”. not gonna happen.
February 7th, 2008 at 6:38 am
yes, wonderful slug: “tips-and-tricks-rhel-ref” . Irony++.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Even better, the URL of the article:
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/04/tips-and-tricks-rhel-ref/
Can’t use RHEL, eh?
February 8th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Also and it’s supposed to be GNU/Linux, not just Linux, right? Too late!
February 13th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I’m glad I know how to refer to “it” now. I’ve been using “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” in the external specification I’m writing and only came here (via “rhel” in google) to see about version numbers. Now that I’ve been told I can’t use RHEL, I’m going straight back to my document to add RHEL to the glossary. I know I only refer to RHEL 2 or 3 times in the document, and that adding a glossary entry to say what RHEL means and to put RHEL after the first use of RHEL in the main document will actually increase the size of the document, which is not what the use of acronyms like RHEL is meant to do. OK, let’s enter RHEL in the glossary …
February 28th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Maybe someone should tell your new boss that he can’t use RHEL as he says it in his JBoss Keynote!
March 6th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Through my employers, I’ve had business relations with you guys (Red Hat or your predecessor, Cygnus Support aka Solutions) since the early 90s. I love your technical people and pity them for having to deal with the rest of you.
Red Hat should stop fighting its own customers. We have thousands of paid-up RHEL installations at my employer, and that’s what we call it. That’s also what many Red Hat employees call it. Please tell your attorneys to take a chill pill. The term is unambiguous and it isn’t insulting.
The longer phrases you suggest might be appropriate once in a document, and your suggested abbreviations are nonsensical. You actually think that just “version 5″ should be used instead of RHEL5? That’s absurd! Any documentation that needs to distinguish versions of Red Hat operating systems will also have to distinguish versions of other software. Version 5 of what?
It appears that you have picked up too many marketing and legal people from traditional corporations. You need to deprogram them, and teach them to communicate like human beings.
Joe
March 6th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
The original article from the Knowledgebase definitely reads like it’s for the technical writers who produce RHEL docs. Unfortunately that style (”… it is never correct …”) is not as appropriate when read here on Red Hat Magazine. I assure you all it is proper language for instructing your technical writers who have to be 100% accurate with trademarked terms of all vendors, as one example.
Regardless, there is a nugget of information that is important here. If you need to communicate about RHEL in an unambiguous manner, such as when making a tech support call/request, it is helpful to know exactly what is called what.
It is easier with the version 5 release, but previous releases had a blend of letters and numbers that actually mattered when it came to, for example, what packages are in the supported release you have. In other words, there is a difference between “RHEL ES 3u5″ and “Enterprise Linux 3.9 ES.”
Think of this tip as, “When you absolutely must be clearly understood to mean what you mean, use these terms in this way …”
March 6th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I suggest deleting this entry. It just makes Red Hat look stupid. It’s too late to force the marketing department’s whims on the universe. When I’m writing docs, I’m not devoting 20+ extra bytes every page to differentiating between RHEL, SLES, & Ubuntu because the abbreviations are perfectly understandable.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I suspect that this is the trademark lawyers, not the marketing department. Trademark law is, well, often somewhat silly, because it was put together by legislators and diplomats who didn’t understand the first thing about linguistics (specifically, word formation) but who tried to legislate on it anyway. Every corporation seems to have to put up some sort of CYA statement like this, and absolutely everyone ignores it, because it’s fighting human language itself. Human language invariably wins.
This is actually fairly mild as these things go: many such statements try to ban you from referring to a trademark in particular places in a sentence, generally trying to state in a rather inept fashion that you should treat the word as an atomic unit and never e.g. pluralize it, add a possessive, etc… Of course, this too is widely ignored. (It’s probably utterly impossible to avoid transforming the word in most Indo-European languages, and just wait until it’s imported into Japanese…)
March 6th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Honestly it would be a good idea to tradmark or use the term RHEL, it has been created by and integrated with culture. This makes it ideal for marketing, throwing it away would be a very bad idea!
March 7th, 2008 at 6:45 am
The URL for this article/tip includes “tips-and-tricks-rhel-ref”. You could have specified “tips-and-tricks-red-hat-enterprise-linux-ref” if RHEL is NEVER the appropriate way to refer to Red Hat’s premier OS offering. As you did not, I will kindly disregard (i.e., take with a grain of salt) your resolute admonition against using the obvious choice.
Positive suggestion: adopt and embrace RHEL. Make sure it is pronounced as the “rel” in “relative”. Perhaps get Alan Cox to make a “how I pronounce RHEL” .ogg file. Then couple it with the Ruby on Rails hype and promote “Rails on RHEL” or RoRoR.
Have fun with it.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
You’re kidding, right? Do you seriously expect real people to go around talking like overly-pedantic weenies? Maybe you would prefer that no one talk about your products at all! Come on RH, who wrote this silly article? You can’t be serious.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
[…] Okay it has been known for a while, but I just recently found out so I figure I should help put the light on a recent hilarious article published in the Red Hat Magazine: It is never correct to abbreviate “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” as “RHEL”. (That’s actually not the correct title of the article, but the correct title is so ridiculously long I won’t paste it here since it’d take everyone’s breaths away.) […]
March 7th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I think I’m going to refer to as it Community ENTerprise Operating System from now on.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Red Hat,
It is due almost entirely to me that my current employer now permits RHEL in our datacenter. You don’t want to tick off people like me in this way–really. These kinds of things do that.
By contrast, you have much to gain by adopting “RHEL” as an official abbreviation for your operating environment. Consider the example of “IHOP”, which, of course, stands for the International House of Pancakes.
Years ago, tons of folks started calling that restaurant “IHOP” because it is much shorter to say, and it was so obvious who “IHOP” was. The company embraced the name, and it’s now on nearly all of their signage. They have profited handsomely from that decision.
Another one is McDonalds. Their common nickname, “Mickey-D”, first given them by the Black American community, got embraced by the company in the early 1990’s. They even made a burger by the name for a little while. You really mean to tell me that if someone said, “let’s go to Mickey-D’s,” that you *wouldn’t* know what that person meant??
Red Hat, you have shown so much common sense in so many areas. Please don’t disappoint us by failing to do so here.
–TP
March 8th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
[…] This is about a month old, better late than never…Red Hat Magazine has put up a “tips and tricks article” on a question which must be on the top of everybody’s list: How does one properly refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? They provide a couple dozen verbose alternatives, then assert: “It is never correct to abbreviate ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux’ as ‘RHEL’” A search for “RHEL” on redhat.com suggests that a few in-house people haven’t gotten this memo yet. (Seen on 451 CAOS Theory). […]
March 10th, 2008 at 4:26 am
I really hope this is a lawyer mandated trademark due diligence piece of work and not a real posting about the current mindset at RH.. :-(
PS: If RHEL isn’t allowed can I use RHELL instead when whinging about its poor ext3 filesystem performance ? :-)
Chris
March 10th, 2008 at 5:43 am
“It is never correct to abbreviate “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” as “RHEL”.”
Sigh. Just sigh. Good luck with that.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:06 am
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.4 Update 3″ What a mouthful. Who do you think you are? IBM?
March 14th, 2008 at 2:28 am
Hahahaha… this has got to be the funniest article I have read this year! You can’t put the genie back into the bottle on this issue, and frankly, it makes RH just look stupid.
How the hell did this article ever get approved by RH’s PR department?
March 14th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I can’t believe this is still up. It’s very embarrassing. I suspect most Red Hat employees, like me, believe that such mandates are counter to our culture of freedom.
March 25th, 2008 at 1:26 am
It is never correct… How do you prove this theorem? :-)
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
that’s what was said about s.o.l. and shit out of luck. but look how that turned out. i guess you’re, well, s.o.l. with people not using rhel.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
If it is never correct to use RHEL, why is it in the URL of this page?
April 10th, 2008 at 7:23 am
I have nothing to add here but just want to show RH that people do care about such stupidities. Please joint the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate PR guys…
April 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am
The pleasant thing about using CentOS is that they remove all of redhat’s marketing B.S.
Rearranging RHEL5 into Desktop and Server and breaking out the RPM repos on the CD to separate Server, Cluster, ClusterStorage and Virtualization was just annoying.
I don’t know why anyone pays redhat for the privilege of dealing with the latest way their marketing department wants to mess with the O/S.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Retarded. Everyone calls it RHEL. Get over it.
The RHEL-repackagers expose the stupidity in creating strata in a product line. Its RHEL. There is no Desktop. There is no Server. There is no Advanced Server. I think RHEL should be offered as Redhat used to be: One size fits all OS, with install profiles being the only difference. The license is simply an un-enforced right to use.