HMC Mathematics Computing Weblog

We now have some notes on TeX and LaTeX resources available.

The machines in the Scientific Computing Lab have been upgraded to Red Hat Linux 7.3. As a result, there are several changes that will affect your interaction with the systems:

• KDE is now available as a desktop choice. You can choose the KDE desktop by selecting it from the Session menu on the GDM login panel.
• The printing backend has changed from LPRng to CUPS. CUPS is more flexible and powerful than LPRng, and is being adopted by several distributions (including Red Hat) and other operating systems (such as Mac OS X) as their default printing backend.
• The XPP client has been added. Use xpp anywhere you would ordinarily use lpr, and you'll get a graphical print dialog similar to the ones you get with Mac OS or Windows.

• dvips behavior has changed so that dvips, by default, produces a PostScript file rather than dumping output to your default printer.

  To get the old behavior, edit your ~/.tcshrc and add the following line:

  alias dvipsp 'dvips -o|lpr'

• The Enlightenment window manager is no longer available.
• The Evolution mail/calendar client is available.

There are many other changes -- subtle and otherwise -- that I can't easily summarize here. For more information, you may want to read Red Hat's release notes for 7.3.

If you notice any problems, please let me know by sending mail to system@math.hmc.edu.