Following assorted comments and thoughts in this morning's Linux strategy
meeting, I have a few things to say about what I'd like to see in the
forthcoming Fermi Linux release. This is mostly related to our experiences
here at CDF installing several new machines and dealing with problems and
feature requests from users, with a request or two of my own. Comments and
discussion on this are obviously welcomed.
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*) Top of my list of things I'd like to see is a completely re-structured
fermi-ups package. The current one installs into /fnal/ups (or wherever)
and scatters several things (including startup scripts in /usr/local/etc
and other important places). I thought the whole idea of UPSv4 was that
one could install most packages without privileged access to system areas,
and have everything including setups.{c,}sh accessible from the same
place. Here at CDF we rip out the fermi-ups package and install our own,
which has the products home area living under /usr/products, the database
in /usr/products/upsdb and the startup scripts in /usr/products/setups. We
also have upd configured *not* to have the extra <flavor> directory, but
that's probably a matter of personal taste and is anyway easily
configurable by a sysAdmin. As a minor problem report, the current version
of flpr provided with this rpm is over 1 year out of date and is installed
(I believe) with the wrong permissions. Contact Randy Herber
<herber@fnal.gov> for more information on this and obtaining the latest
version.
*) the tmpwatch package as provided by RedHat in v5.0 has a bug:
/etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch has the wrong permissions and is therefore never
run. This can be fixed by getting the source rpm, making the script
executable, re-making the tar file and rebuilding the rpm.
*) mt-st-0.5b -- has the stinit utility, useful for configuring tape
devices (eg DLT, Mammoth).
*) Latest version of xntp, along with a suitable ntp.conf tailored for
Fermilab.
*) Latest (at the time) available versions of Aladdin Ghostscript, fonts,
etc, etc. The RedHat distribution only contains GNU ghostscript (about
12-18 months old) because they sell their distributions for profit and
therefore violate Aladdin's license agreement which is more restrictive
than the GPL. You should check with Fermilab's laywers, but I'm fairly
sure we would be within the terms of Aladdin's license. You should also
consider making the correct (non-dummy) pdf_sec.ps file available, but
*ONLY* within the US. We are sorely in need of something capable of
producing universally printable postscript from pdf, and even gs v5.10
doesn't cut it.
*) gpm v1.14 or better along with a README describing the hoops to be
jumped through to get the Microsoft Intellimouse (with wheely-thing) to
work with X (we can provide the instructions). This package requires
ncurses 4 last time I looked (see notes on XEmacs, below).
*) Latest version of pine (v4.05 currently). I notice this is now
available from KITS, so you may just want to remove the existing one from
the distribution and either include the KITS version in fermi-ups or just
give instructions for people to upd-install it.
*) XEmacs v20.4. Users *will* request this, and the rpm in RedHat contrib
is tricky to install because it depends on several packages which need
care during their installation:
xpm-3.4j;
libjpeg-6b (needs installing alongside (with rpm -i instead of rpm -U)
libjpeg-6a. You also need to set up a symbolic link by hand:
`cd /usr/lib ; ln -s libjpeg.so.7.0 libjpeg.so.62 ;
/sbin/ldconfig');
libpng-1.0.2 (needs installing alongside libpng-0.96-1, on 5.0.2 at least)
ncurses4 (needs installing with rpm -ivh --force to coexist with v3 on
v5.0 systems. Your Mileage May Vary);
Note you may not need to jump through as many hoops with whatever base
Redhat release you may be considering as we did with v5.0.2.
*) cvs v1.10 (from cyclic) and pcl-cvs v2.9.2 (from
ftp://rum.cs.yale.edu/pub/monnier/pcl-cvs/). cvs v1.10 has many problems
fixed over v1.9, and one nice feature is that it no longer depends on RCS.
The latest version of pcl-cvs is *nice*, and the one that comes bundled
with vanilla cvs is ancient.
*) egcs v1.1.1 (or latest available at the time). From KITS? Dunno.
*) I have no personal position on this, but I believe if it should be
discussed anywhere it should be discussed on the linux-users list: the
provision of a desktop system (KDE or GNOME) as an alternative to
traditional (eg fvwm) window managers.
*) Latest (at the time) version of jdk. This is most useful for kdb, the
kai debugger, but many other projects (especially online) are using java.
*) Because Linux machines are (usually) fairly stable and tend to stay up
for some time, one would like to have the disks checked more often than
the 20 reboots to which the ext2 filesystem defaults since corruptions
tend to accumulate over time. I do this simply by:
echo 'echo "-f" > /fsckoptions' > /etc/cron/monthly/fsckcheck
chmod +x /etc/cron/monthly/fsckcheck
which forces a full disk check on the first reboot after the 1st of the
month.
*) Make zip disks and floppy drives accessible by normal users. Some
(possibly) useful entries I have in my /etc/fstab are:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660
noauto,user,ro,nosuid,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip msdos
noauto,user,suid,noexec 0 0
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/lzip ext2
noauto,user,nosuid,noexec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy msdos
noauto,user,suid,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/lfloppy ext2
noauto,user,nosuid,noexec 0 0
linux-rep.fnal.gov:/mirror/ftp/pub/mirrors
/mnt/linux-rep nfs defaults,noauto,user,exec,ro,soft,bg 0 0
You may also need to alter the permissions on /dev/cdrom, /dev/hdd4 and
/dev/fd0
You may or may not wish to do this, but if not I hope this serves as
useful advice to anyone who wishes to do this on their own machine. One
can also make the zip drive usable by the mtools utility by adding
(something like) the following line to /etc/mtools/conf:
drive Z: file="/dev/hdd" partition=4 privileged=1
and making sure that mtools is setgid floppy.
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That is about all I can think of for now. Some of this (like the last
point) is less a suggestion for the next release and more a pre-emptive
HOWTO for one or two things individuals might like to do on their own
machines. Still other requests may be rendered edundant by
whatever is already available in whatever RedHat release on which you
base the next Fermi-Linux release. Comments welcomed in any case.
Cheers,
Chris.
-- Chris Green. HEP, Purdue University. CDF SVXII project. Based at Fermilab. MAIL greenc@fnal.gov; PHONE (630) 840-2308