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.