Athena 9.3 Release Notes

In July 2004, Information Systems will release the latest version of the Athena system (Release 9.3) on Sun and Linux workstations. These changes are summarized in this document.

Summary of Changes

Some of the most visible changes effective with this release are the following:

Operating System Upgrades:

• Red Hat Linux 9 upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
• Solaris 9 updated to 4/04 release

Basic Application Software:

• Nautilus File Manager added to desktop
• Samba 3.0.2a added to the release
• New mail utilities
• Evolution made the default mail handler for Mozilla
• Other minor software updates

For Developers:

• Python added to the release
• zenity added to the release
• GCC 3.2.1 updated to 3.3.2
• Kermit 6.0 updated to 8.0
• Perl 5.8.0 updated to 5.8.3

For Private Workstation Owners:

• ksrvutil removed
• Entire Solaris release installed locally

Details about these user-visible changes are listed below. For the complete list of changes in the release (not only user-visible changes), see the System Release Notes.

Operating System Updates

Red Hat Linux 9 upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. All Linux Athena workstations set to autoupdate will be upgraded from Red Hat Linux 9 to Red Hat Enterprise when they take the new release. Visit Red Hat's Features and Benefits page or Release Notes for detailed information about Red Hat Enterprise.

Solaris 9 has been updated to the 4/04 release. This is not a major update to the operating system. It is primarily a bug fix and security update and should have minimal end user impact.

Basic Application Software

The Nautilus file manager has added to desktop. The file manager icons appear by default in the upper left hand corner of your screen. In order to make room for Nautilus, the default initial teminal window has been moved to the lower right hand portion of the screen. For more information about the Nautilus file manager, visit gnome.org's Nautilus Project pages.

Samba 3.0.2a has been added to the release. This allows access to Windows file shares from Athena workstations with an interface similar to ftp using smbclient. For Kerberos authentication, add the -k flag. To list the shares on a host:

          athena% smbclient -k -L hostname
     

Connect to a share on that host:

          athena% smbclient -k //hostname/sharename

Several new mail utilities have been added to the release. These utilities allow command-line manipulation of mail in your IMAP mail store similar to the command-line nmh suite of commands:

• mitmailscan
• mitmailshow
• mitmaildel
• mitmailundel
• mitmailexp

Evolution has been made the default mail handler for Mozilla. When you click on a mailto: link in Mozilla, it will now launch the Evolution mail program instead of using Mozilla's mail program. If you wish to revert to the old behavior, go to the url about:config. Scroll down to the line that says:

           network.protocol-handler.external.mailto 

Select the above line. Change "True" to "False."

Man other minor software updates were made as part of the release. Few end user visible changes should be noticible as these releases are minor and contain primarily bug fixes and behind the scenes optimizations. Some of the software packages that received minor updates were:

• Emacs 21.1 to 21.3
• Evolution 1.4.4 to 1.4.5
• Pine 4.55 to 4.58
• xscreensaver 3.29 to 4.14

For Developers

Python 2.3.3 has been added to the release for both platforms. Linux systems also contain the native 2.2.3 install. For more information and documentation, see python.org.

The zenity dialog tool has added to the release. It is GNOME based tool that allows you to display dialog boxes from the command line or via shell scripts. For more information see http://freshmeat.net/projects/zenity.

GCC 3.2.1 has been updated to 3.3.2. For full feature updates and changes see the release notes

Kermit 6.0 updated to 8.0 See the release notes for details.

Perl updated from 5.8.0 to 5.8.3. This version includes thread support. For full details see the release notes.

For Private Workstation Owners

ksrvutil has been removed from the release as it no longer exists. If you had not yet migrated to using k5srvutil, you will need to do so at this time. You will need to convert your existing Kerberos 4 srvtab file to a Kerberos 5 keytab file using the ktconvert utility. Attempts to use the old ksrvutil command will result in an error message containing instructions for migration.

The entire Solaris release now installed locally on Solaris machines via the Solaris pkgadd system. This brings the Athena Solaris release closer in line with stock Solaris installs and may improve performance for some customers as all of the system software and Athena software previously on the system packs is now located on the local disk.