DESY Linux 4 at Zeuthen
DL4 is approaching its end of life date.
Find information about DL5
here.
Contents
Support for USB Memory Sticks on Desktop PCs is now available (June 10, 2003)
USB support in general is still considered
slightly experimental, which is why we do not enable it on by default.
If you'd like to give it a try, you can ask us to enable USB on your desktop
(don't forget to tell us which one it is) by sending mail to uco@ifh.de.
Once this is done, you should be able to plug the memory stick into any USB port and then mount the device with
mount /media/usbstor (for unpartitioned devices) or mount /media/usbstor1
(for the first partition on the stick). Most memory sticks seem to have a single
partition, but mount points are provided up to /media/usbstor9.
Don't forget to unmount it (with umount /media/...) before unplugging the
stick, or you will damage the filesystem on it. Try dosfsck(1) if you did it anyway - it's
located in /sbin. The device is /dev/sda or /dev/sda1 or ..., and is fully accessible by the user
logged in on the local screen (only). Hence you may also change the partitioning or create
a more reasonable filesystem on your memory stick.
This has been testes successfully on hosts of the najade, nereide and oceanide classes,
as well as on the PCs with a 750 Mhz PIII that have individual names. If you have an older desktop PC,
you'd be the guinea pig. Notice that a malfunctioning USB driver may hang your PC.
DESY Linux 4 is the supported Linux at DESY Zeuthen.
DL4 is running today on all linux hosts at Zeuthen with the exception of two
special purpose machines.
It has proven to be quite stable. Today (in June 2003) there are all kinds
of hosts (desktops and servers) with uptimes well in excess of a year.
Note that KDE ist still semi supported only:
Due to it's complexity, we cannot guarantee that each and every
feature will work correctly. It seems to be quite usable though.
Here's the list of known issues to be resolved:
- The newgrp command is buggy: The new shell should inherit the
environment of the parent; instead it is reset to a very minimal one.
A workaround is to use the "-" option which at least yields the usual
environment of login shells.
- Linker warnings concerning the use of the unsafe library routine
tmpnam are issued for all code that links to the g77 OPEN call. The
problem is old, the warning new. For the time being, please ignore
the warning (unless it's due to your own code). The warning is relevant
only if you open files in SCRATCH mode.
Today, DL4 is probably more stable and free of problems than any previous
linux version ever was.
- In rare cases, man pages failed to be displayed because of a missing
anocdb macro. As of June 2003, this should no longer happen since we provide
an environment variable telling groff where to find it.
- After logging out, it sometimes took a minute or two until the
kdm login form reappears. Just be patient. This turned out
to have several reasons.
It should have improved as of March 8, 2002. It should have improved further
as as of April 11, 2002. This problem has not been observed recently (2003)
- Spurious "can't locate module net-pf-10" messages were always harmless (meaning
some software checked for IPv6) and should be gone as of April 18, 2002.
- The font path used by the X server was lacking the ":unscaled" elements in front
with the result that some fixed width fonts especially in netscape looked ugly.
As of April 16, 2002, they are inserted during nightly maintenaince if missing.
- The fonts used in the kdm login form were often ugly. There was one
reported case where they were unreadable. As of March 1, 2002 fonts used by
kdm should be beautiful in any case.
- KDE users: You have to choose keyboard setting "vt100(historical)"
in konsole to make arrow keys etc. work correctly on remote hosts. This is now
the default.
- Handcrafted fvwm2rcs, Xsessions etc. may not work due to
different paths for modules, icons and simliar. The fvwm2rc generated
by the supported Hepix environment and Hepix itself
work fine. If you want to stay with your own fvwmrc, extend your paths
by what you find in the generated file. Documentation on how to customize
your X11 environment correctly is
here
- XEmacs is installed as version 21.1.14. This brings numerous
new modes - and new problems and incompatibilities. For example, it
now by default thinks that .inc files contain php source. To tell it
that you want fortran mode for .inc files, add the following to your
~/.emacs:
(setq auto-mode-alist
(append '(
("\\.inc$" . fortran-mode)
) auto-mode-alist)
)
- GNU Emacs is provided as is, without further support. No global
site-start.el is provided anymore. If you want the customized key bindings
you got used to, do it in your ~/.emacs. Here's an example how to remap
the "Home" and "End" keys:
(global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key [end] 'end-of-buffer)
We now also provide a file similar to the site-start.el from previous installations.
To get (almost) the same behaviour of emacs as on, say, paris, add the following line
to your ~/.emacs:
(load "desy-start" 'NOERROR)
- r commands like rsh, rcp are deprecated and often don't work at all anymore,
in other cases the password must be given where this wasn't needed in DL3.
Use ssh instead, possibly with public key authorization. Software that makes use
of rsh et al by default can usually be told to use ssh instead (example: -e ssh
for rsync).
- Some software in /products is still linked against the libXm.so.1 from
lesstif that is not present on DL4. If you get an error message to this
effect, using "LD_PRELOAD=/products/lesstif/lib/libXm.so.1 command"
should help - but please report these cases tu uco. Do not put the
above (or a similar LD_LIBRARY_PATH) into your default environment.
Some more information:
Last modified: June 10, 2003
Stephan Wiesand