Fedora meets RHEL

As we enter the final freeze before the Fedora 27 Workstation release, I’d like to highlight a new feature that will hopefully make Fedora more attractive for developers. Last month, I had written about our experiments to make it easier to consume gratis, self-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations from Fedora Workstation. I am happy to report that this is now a reality.

Starting from Fedora 27 Workstation, you’ll be able to install an infinite number of RHEL 7.x VMs right from inside GNOME Boxes. All you need is an account on developers.redhat.com, and it will automatically set up a RHEL virtual machine that’s entitled to the RHEL Developer Suite subscription.

Thanks to Felipe Borges for a seemingly endless round of patch reviews, and Fabiano and Victor for occasionally lending us their brain.

Downloading RHEL 7 ISOs for free

A year and a half ago, frighteningly close to 1st April, Red Hat announced the availability of a gratis, self-supported, developer-only subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a series of other products. Simply put, if you went to developers.redhat.com, created an account and clicked a few buttons, you could download a RHEL ISO without paying anything to anybody. For the past few months, I have been investigating whether we can leverage this to do something exciting in Fedora Workstation. Particularly for those who might be building applications on Fedora that would eventually be deployed on RHEL.

While trying to figure out how the developers.redhat.com website and its associated infrastructure works, I discovered that its source code is actually available on GitHub. Sadly, my ineptitude with server-side applications and things like JBoss, Ruby, etc. meant that it wasn’t enough for me to write code that could interface with it. Luckily, the developers were kind enough to answer my questions, and now I know enough to write a C program that can download a free RHEL ISO.

The code is here: download-rhel.c.

I’ll leave it here in the hope that some unknown Internet traveller might find it useful. As for Fedora Workstation, I’ll let you know if we manage to come up with something concrete. 😉