System Release Notes 8.4
Introduction
This document describes the software changes in Athena System Release
8.4. It contains an overview of the important changes, and detail on
changes in the release as a whole.
Operating System Changes
- Supported Architectures
Release 8.4 supports the following architectures:
- Solaris 7
- IRIX 6.5.7
- Red Hat Linux 6.2
- Solaris 7
Athena release 8.4 includes an upgrade to Solaris 7. We are using
the native package and patch tools to distribute the Solaris operating
system software instead of track, which we hope will result in
increased reliability and fewer unnecessary changes to the OS software
during Athena updates.
A number of Solaris machines do not have big enough /usr partitions
for Solaris 7. Solaris machines will not update to Athena releas
8.4 unless they have a usr partition of at least 100MB (a /usr
filesystem size of at least 90MB qualifies). Machines whose /usr
partitions are too small will have to be reinstalled before they can
take the update. The Athena release team will be in contact with the
owners of machines in this situation.
- IRIX 6.5.7
We have upgraded from IRIX 6.5.3 to IRIX 6.5.7. For the most part,
there should be no visible differences except for increased stability
of O2 machines.
Due to a bad interaction with AFS, we have been forced to temporarily
disable a processor workaround in the IRIX kernel for a buggy
instruction (cvtl, which converts a long integer to a floating point
number) in the R5000 rev 1.x processor, used by most of the Indy
machines in the clusters. Testing has not revealed any specific
problems caused by disabling this workaround, but it could conceivably
result in incorrect results by numerical programs. We will reenable
the workaround as soon as we get a fix from SGI for the AFS problem.
- Red Hat Linux 6.2
With the 8.4 release, Athena now supports Red Hat Linux. The
structure of the Athena port to Linux is different from other ports;
instead of having a /srvd directory containing an install image of all
of the Athena software, the port is distributed as a collection of
packages in the native package format (RPM). Because the operating
system and the Athena software are distributed in the same package
format, the update system is simplified. In addition, administrators
of Linux machines can choose to retain more control over their
machines and install only specific Athena RPMs.
As a local modification to Red Hat 6.2, we have replaced the Red Hat
vim package with a locally built nvi package, for better vi
compatibility.
Changes to Externally Maintained Software
The following externally maintained software packages were upgraded or
added:
- AFS updated to 3.6
- autoconf 2.13 added
- glib 1.2.8 added
- gtk+ 1.2.8 added
- ifhp (LPRng filter) from 3.2.7 to 3.3.10
- krb5 from 1.0.7 to 1.1.1
- LPRng from 3.6.1 to 3.6.13
- perl from 5.04_004 to 5.6.0
- teTeX 1.0.6 added
Some of these upgrades have only minor impact. Those upgrades or
additions with notable impact are described in the subsections below.
- glib and gtk+
The popular gtk+ graphical toolkit library, and the glib library it
depends on, have been added to the Athena release.
- teTeX
We have replaced the locally maintained collection of tex software
with the teTeX distribution. We hope this will result in a more
stable and complete tetex distribution.
New Athena Programs
athrun --
A new script named ``athrun'' has been added to simplify the task of
running a piece of software out of a locker without adding it to your
path (and making sure that the program comes from the locker you asked
for instead of somewhere earlier in your path). The general usage is
``athrun {\em lockername} {\em program} {\em arguments}''. If you are
running a program with no arguments out of a locker with the same name
as the program, you can simply run ``athrun {\em lockername}''; for
instance, ``athrun xess'' will run xess out of the xess locker.
Decommissioned Programs
Two obscure programs have been removed from the release: rep and
xmore. The zephyr version of the syslogd program has also been
removed, as has the Athena version of imake for Solaris.
Other Changes
- Local Copy of Netscape
Netscape startup times should be improved under most circumstances, as
workstations will now do a local copy of netscape from the infoagents
locker onto local disk. If, for whatever reason, users want to run
the infoagents locker copy of netscape instead of the local copy, they
can run ``athrun infoagents netscape'' or use ``add -f infoagents''.
- Screensaver Enabled by Default
The set of default X startup activities now includes running the
standard screensaver, xss. The xss defaults have also been modified
so that they will lock the screen one minute after automatically
screensaving (which happens after ten minutes of idle time).
xss-button has been modified to work properly when an xss process is
already running, so users who run xss-button in their dotfiles should
not experience problems. Users who run xss in their dotfiles will see
an error message in the console.
Users can disable the xss startup by putting ``skip_xss'' in
.environment.