ROSA Enterprise Linux Server

ROSA Enterprise Linux Server is an open source operating system that has been designed from the ground up to provide users with a highly scalable server system that supports both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows clients, integrates easily with existing corporate networks, and has SSO (Single Sign-On) support.

Distributed as installable only DVDs

Just like any other professional server oriented operating system, this Linux distribution is distributed as installable one DVD ISO images, designed to support the 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i386) instruction set architectures.

Boot options

As expected, the boot menu of this ROSA edition is a bit different from the Desktop Fresh flavors, allowing the user to install a fresh copy or upgrade an existing system, install the system with basic video drivers, rescue a broken operating system, boot an existing OS from the first disk or run a system memory test.

Graphical installer à la Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Being based on the the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, the distribution presents users with a graphical installer that requires them choose a language and keyboard layout, select what type of devices the installation will involve, enter a hostname and configure the network, set up date, clock and timezone, add a root password, and choose an installation type.

In addition, the user will be able to select the type of server to install, such as database server, web server, virtual machine host, software development workstation (includes a graphical desktop environment), or a standard ROSA server with the LXDE desktop environment. After installation, it is a must to set up users and passwords, as well as to configure the date and time.

Includes state-of-the-art server technologies

The operating system includes state-of-the-art server technologies, among which we can mention OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Busybox, Open LDAP, MIT Kerberos, NFS4, Samba, CUPS, WebDAV, libvirt, OpenStack, Postfix, Cyrus-IMAP, Dovecot, Roundcube Webmail, SpamAssassin, Sendmail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQlite, Apache, PHP, Perl, Squid and Bacula.

Bottom line

Summing up, ROSA Enterprise Linux Server is a pretty good server oriented operating system that uses the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux technologies, a very stable Linux kernel from the 2.6 branch, and a whole plethora of powerful features.

What is new in this release:

• updated versions of ROSA Directory Server, ROSA Server Setup and ROSA Management Console;
• bugfixes in USB installation mode;
• support RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over Ethernet (RoCE);
• support for new 40Gb network adapters;
• improvements in virtualization when running as guest OS;
• new load balancers HAproxy and keepalived;
• Java 8 support;
• updated graphics stack (X.org, video card drivers, libraries).