This academy will produce up to 120 Red Hat Certified Technicians a year, contributing to the pool of Linux trained professionals here. Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ:RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions announced on 13 Sep 2005 their partnership agreements with Nanyang Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic respectively, kicking off the industry acclaimed Red Hat Academy in Singapore. The agreements reaffirm Red Hat’s continued commitment to support Linux and open source education by not only educating Singapore’s future IT managers on open source fundamentals, but also inspiring new open source development and entrepreneurship here. Led by the Temasek Informatics & IT School in Temasek Polytechnic and the School of Engineering in Nanyang Polytechnic (both of which, already offer basic Linux course modules), the Red Hat Academy programme will be offered to promising students who want to attain industry recognition in the form of the Red Hat certification.

Reinforcing its support for Red Hat Academy, Ms Lim Sok Keow, Director, Temasek Informatics & IT School said, ”Temasek Polytechnic has long been recognised by the IT industry for our leading role in providing the Singapore workforce with certified IT professionals who are highly sought after. As Singapore faces increasingly tougher competition from the world, we are constantly looking at ways to enhance the value of our graduates and boost their lead in the IT industry. This tie-up with Red Hat through the Academy program reaffirms Temasek Polytechnic’s commitment to producing top-rated certified IT professionals in areas of high demand”.

The Program
The program consists of two courses that will train the students to be ready to take the Red Hat Certified Technician exam. The two courses offered are:

1) RHA 030 Red Hat Linux Computing Essentials Students will learn to be effective users of Linux systems, acquiring skills and understanding of command line functions, file systems, users and groups, bash shell, process management, text editors, network applications, searching and organizing data, and graphical applications.

2) RHA 130 Red Hat Linux Core System Administration Students will learn to be effective administrators of Linux systems, mastering tasks such as hardware and device configuration, file system management, user administration, network configurations, kernel services, attaching new Linux systems to a corporate network, configuring the new systems for end users, and troubleshooting.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through toptier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com