Just a few days after the release of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL), Oracle is now out with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 (OEL).

As Red Hat has been updating RHEL, Oracle has also been releasing its own version of Linux with OEL.

Oracle has repeated many times that OEL does not trail RHEL.

Speaking on the topic, Oracle Linux engineering’s director Wim Coekaerts said, “A lot of people think Oracle is doing Enterprise Linux as just basically a rip off of Red Hat, but that's not what this is about.”

After RHEL 5.5 release, the OEL 5.5 release would help the company to keep pace and derive benefit from the new virtualization as well as hardware support improvements offered by RHEL 5.5.

By launching RHEL 5.5, Red Hat added virtualization improvements, tweaks to windows 7 interoperability and support for new hardware platforms.