I am trying to download the 'latest' Red Hat Enterprise. My objective is to create a VMWare virtual machine on my computer (I'm running Windows 8.1)

My problem is this: I go to https://access.redhat.com/site/produ...erprise-linux/ and the latest version is 6.5.

When I click on the download button, I get the message:
"We're sorry, but the channel could not be found.

This error may have occurred in one of three ways:

Your RHN account does not include appropriate software channel entitlements to access the channel content.
Your RHN account administrator has marked this channel subscribable on a per-user basis.
You've found an error in our site. Please help us by filling out this form with details of how you received this message."

Do you have to pay for RHE?

Yes you do have to pay for Red Hat. Try CentOS or Scientific Linux instead.

You can download the 'trial version' at the site below, 30 days and no updates, no support. If you are going to be using it for a server online, it will be pretty useless after 30 days. Either pay them if you really want RedHat or use CentOS or Scientific.

http://www.redhat.com/products/enter.../download.html

CentOS is now sponsored by Red Hat, with RH staff helping to produce it, so the only difference is the price and some extra hardware support in CentOS.

You don't have to pay to Red Hat to use their system, you can use it for free but without support. Because Linux must be open-source/free they cannot charge Linux OS to you. Btw Red Hat's FTP server is always giving ISO to download, just use with wget... This is 64bit version.

That something is open source does not mean that you can't charge money for it. Selling open source software is just not a viable way to run a successful business.

Or Oracle linux.

Actually you can get Suse at SuseStudio too.