DESY Linux 5 at Zeuthen
From 2004, to March 2005, DL5 was the default and recommended Linux version at DESY Zeuthen. It was replaced by Scientific Linux 3.
We no longer deploy DESY Linux 5, neither on new systems nor on existing ones with a broken hard drive (installation on recent hardware is not even possible unless we'd invest much time into it).
Support for DL5 was finally terminated in December 2005.
Despite the help from SuSE 9.0, the problems not easily fixed or worked around keeps mounting. Hennce:
All systems allowing interactive access - including and particularly desktops - will become unusable December 1st, 2005. This has been announced to the group admins of the three remaining groups still running a few DL5 desktops in October 2005.
statml command listing mathematica licenses
is available again
make cintdlls,mailfwd command will become available tonight
- root 3.10/02 available
du command that
works correctly in the top level directory of AFS volumesPrevious News are archived here.
The content of /usr1 will be preserved except for hosts with very small disks:
Installation is possible on as little as 2 GB, but some bulky software
packages like OpenOffice or LaTeX will be missing. This should not be a problem
on any desktop PC foreseen to run another year. If in doubt, check with
df -m /
Once the upgrade is prepared, we have to disable all maintenance mechanisms for this host until it is performed. For this reason, we require the user to reboot and let the host upgrade itself the same day. Otherwise, we will reboot early next morning.
Installation takes 20 minutes on latest generation desktops, to one hour on very old PCs.
The monitor should be turned on during the upgrade because it's queried for its capabilities and a reasonable graphics setup is chosen accordingly. This works very well in most cases, but if you're not satisfied with the result, we change the settings (resolution, refresh rate) on short notice.
qsub -l farm=iceqsub -l farm=iceDL5
Jobs can find out in which environment they are running by
examining the ouput of the command livesys
(NOT sys) which is
i386_linux24 on DL4 and i586_linux24 on DL5.
An elegant way to make use of the different sysnames is to employ
AFS' ability to substitute a path component of @sys
by this value.
For example:
/afs/ifh.de/group/mygroup/myspace/i386_linux24
/afs/ifh.de/group/mygroup/myspace/i586_linux24
/afs/ifh.de/group/mygroup/myspace/@sys/my.exe
The glibc version of SuSE 8.2 is 2.3.2 - the same as on RedHat 9, chosen to be the next Linux version at many HEP labs.
The AFS sysname of DL5 is i586_linux24
A common trap is that ~/bin is a symbolic
link pointing to
~/.@sys/bin.
You may want to ln -s .i386_linux24 .i586_linux24.
For users with the default setting RUBOUT=BackSpace,
this seems to be worse than on previous DESY linux versions.
RUBOUT=Delete generally works much better. You get this by
touching a file ~/.Delete (and making sure
~/.BackSpace does not
exist). Xemacs users may want to set the variable
delete-key-deletes-forward to a non-nil value to restore
the usual behaviour.
The fvwm2 environment is still available and supported, but users
are encouraged to give KDE a try, which is now also the default option
set on the login screen. Fvwm addicts may want to move their
~/.wmrc to a place where kdm can read it so the
default will be set
to the last session type chosen. To do this, execute
cd
mv .wmrc public
ln -s public/.wmrc .wmrc
With many enhancements and new features. You may want to
save ~/.kde/, ~/.kderc,
~/Desktop before using it the first time.
Another option is to replace them by links into @sys
(i386_linux24 for DL4, i586_linux24 for DL5) which should allow
switching back and forth smoothly.
KDE seems to use some fonts not yet available on our font server. These issues are resolved quickly once reported. As a workaround, all KDE applications allow changing the fonts used easily, but please report these problems anyway.
/media/floppy
/media/cdrom
/media/cdrecorder
/media/sda1
As announced in the past, the /usr1/data
directory will be renamed to /usr1/scratch.
If this breaks software installed there, we set a compatibility link
on request, for a limited time. Remember that local disks may break
and are not backed up.
The C++ ABI has changed with gcc version 3.2. This means that C++ code compiled by earlier versions can NOT be linked with C++ code compiled by recent gcc versions, and vice versa.
The default compiler on DL5 is gcc version 3.3.2. This is a deviation from both SuSE 8.2 (coming with a prerelease of 3.3) and RedHat 9 (coming with the relased 3.3). Versions 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 are mainly bugfix releases of 3.3, but updated runtime libraries are needed at least for C++ in order to run software compiled with the new compiler on a DL5 system. For SuSE 8.2, the rpm packages needed to make a normal installation compatible will be provided.
Version 3.3.3 is available since March 5 and will become the default soon.
The vanilla gcc 3.3 is also provided. Note that even C++ code compiled with this version will NOT work with the shared libraries provided by SuSE 8.2 by default.
For backward compatibility with DL4, gcc 2.95.3 is also provided
(activated by ini gcc2),
as well as several versions of root built by this compiler and - again -
an rpm package with the shared libraries needed for running such
code on plain SuSE 8.2. Note that most other libraries containing
C++ code (in particular Qt and the KDE libs) are NOT available with the
old ABI. Code compiled with gcc2 on DL5 may still work on DL4.
The new compiler does not accept K & R C.
The new compiler honours namespaces. You have to include
using namespace std; in your code if you want
to access
items
from the standard library without qualifying them with
std::
C Functions with variable arguments still using the long deprecated varargs.h must be rewritten to use stdarg.h instead.
In many cases it is no longer possible to access symbols from errno.h without explicitly including this header file.
The preprocessor of gcc3
has stricter syntax requirements - it was always
meant to be used for processing C and C++ only. If you abused it
for something else in the past, the flag -traditional-cpp
may help.
ifc after an ini ic7.
ifort, icc, and
idb.
Whether or not DESY will purchase licenses for these products
is still under review (and user feedback may play a role in that process).
Meanwhile, users have to obtain a free, personal,
non-commercial-use license
before they can use them. Check the ouput of the command
prpm -qi icc and/or prpm -qi ifort for instructions
how to obtain the license key files and what to do with them. You should be
able to get started within about 10 minutes. License keys obtained in the
past for previous versions seem to work fine as well.
Note that version 8 can not be used on DL4 since its glibc is too old.
As of January 12, 2004, new versions of both the 2002 and 2003 packages are installed. The changes are:
The first two items should at least partially address the issue of reproducibility of numeric results mentioned below.
The build procedure for patchy as it comes with the cernlib source (version 5?) seems to be broken. Patchy version 4.15 is available as a separate package.
Versions 7, 8, 9 are available through /opt/products RPM packages and
are independent of the license server. Version 6 is available through
links into the old /products installation and does depend on the
license server. All essential commands (maple, xmaple,
mint, maple8, xmaple8, ...) are available without ini.
Version 9 is actually 9.01, with the update to 9.03 coming soon.
The default (=java) interface of xmaple in version 9 is unable to
print. This is due to it leveraging the java printing API, and this
can only print to a single printing system which is not in use at DESY.
We're evaluating the option of replacing the JRE 1.4.0 coming with maple
with version 1.4.2, which does allow printing at least on user's
default printer. As a workaround, you can start maple with the
old
GUI by running maple -cw.
Version 5 is available through /opt/products RPM packages (commands
math, math5, mathematica , mathematica5, mcc, mcc5).
Version 4 is
available through
links into the old /products installation (commands math4,
mathematica4).
It is recommended
to move ~/.netscape, ~/.netscape6 and ~/.mozilla out
of the way, then start mozilla, and afterwards reimport
your bookmarks.html and reset other settings you do not
like in the new default.
If you don't want to do this and encounter problems
with SSL certificates, try removing all certX.db
files in your profile directory (typically:
~/.mozilla/default/xyz.slt). You have to reimport all
certificates afterwards.
Major differences from a plain mozilla installation are:
Plugins provided:
Since version 1.6, the latter one is no longer a plugin
by default because some users don't like it this way
and it's hard to get rid of. To have mozilla open the
acroread plugin in it's own window instead of calling
the external acroread program for PDF files, you can link
/opt/products/acroread/5.0.8/Browsers/intellinux/nppdf.so
into the directory ~/.mozilla/plugins
. A future release of the acroread package will
provide a generic location for the plugin.
Starting with DL5,
All software in /opt/products is from rpm packages, and hence can be installed on any SuSE 8.2 system. This should however NOT be done by simply installing the packages with normal rpm commands but a separate RPM database should be used (installing several versions of the same package in parallel is reasonable and legal, but will confuse tools like YOU). Detailed documentation on how to do this is in progress. Contact us if you feel you must do it before the documentation is ready.
Since the new version of the NetWorker Software strictly requires a
license (which is
per client and expensive) in order to run any client command,
the commands nwarchive and [nw]recover
are only available on pub1.
Since the commands also fail to detect their server correctly,
the parameter -s jupiter always has to be given.