Athena 9.4 System Release Notes

The following major changes were made in Athena 9.4:

• Red Hat systems are updated from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. RHEL 4 includes a major kernel upgrade (Linux 2.4.x to Linux 2.6.x), which may cause upgrade problems for some hardware configurations. lilo is known not to work reliably under RHEL 4, so systems using lilo will automatically be migrated to grub as part of the update.
• Solaris systems are updated to Solaris 10. As part of this upgrade, we are using the Solaris 10 native version of gcc instead of building and providing our own.
• The GNOME desktop components in the release have been updated to GNOME 2.8.3. Due to changes in GNOME, X toolkit applications will now reflect the colors of the user's gtk theme. Due to a bug in the X toolkit, these color specifications can cause problems for users who use the -reverse option to those applications. Users can work around this problem by using the -fg and -bg options instead of using the -reverse option.
• The default window manager has been changed from Sawfish to Metacity, which is faster and more reliable, although less configurable. Sawfish is still available.
• Firefox has been added to the release, and is now the default and recommended browser, although Mozilla is still present.
• Evolution has been upgraded to 2.0.4. Note that RSS reader functionality is no longer present in Evolution 2.0.
• Root logins are no longer allowed on cluster and quickstation machines. Users can still get access to these machines using the "su" command after logging in.
• Due to licensing and technical changes, sysinfo is no longer available in the release.
• sendmail now delivers messages in the background by default. Some mail user agents can be configured to override this behavior by passing -ODeliveryMode=interactive or -odi on the sendmail command line.
• Gaim 1.4.0 has been added to the Athena release. New users of gaim will receive an account entry for the MIT Jabber service, which is currently in a pilot phase.

The following are known 9.4 upgrade issues:

• On Linux, if you have a custom /etc/aliases file, it must contain the word "Athena" in a comment (the standard Athena /etc/aliases file already has one) or it will be moved to /etc/aliases.old and replaced with the standard Athena version.