coxeter upgrade 2013

Aug 14:

• When using TeX and LaTeX with the utlogo font it is best to use pdftex and pdflatex since the logo does not print properly with xdvi
• Several programs will take a long time to start the first time you run them as configurations are made. For example:
  • acroread (which you should avoid using if possible...okular is supported better on Linux) takes almost a full minute on first startup
  • oowriter, oocalc, etc. take about a half-minute on first startup. This software is now called LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice although the command names are the same as before
• "Pine" is now "Alpine", which is very similar to the old Pine. The command pine will still work to access email.

Aug 9:

• new KDE4 desktop is the only supported desktop (see image below):
  • the first time you login may take up to one minute to configure your new environment; thereafter logins and logouts take less than 10 seconds
  • widgets are locked by default to prevent problems with accidentally creating/erasing widgets/panels/icons (this can be overridden)
• the maple menu entry does not work since maple is not yet available on sphere (there are negotiations going on now between the University and Maplesoft about licensing)



• 1: click here to access (among many other things):
  • the Favorites menu (for acroread, the PDF Viewer that can fill in PDF forms, or for kile, a LaTeX editor)
  • the Applications menu (in Internet there is a GUI for managing sphere's scratch files)
  • the Leave menu (to Logout)
• 2: a GUI file browser
• 3: a terminal window similar to xterm (which you are also welcome to use)
• 4: you can surf the web directly with Firefox here, or you can try the less up-to-date Konqueror in Applications -> Internet as mentioned above
• 5: Thunderbird is the supported email client for those who do not use the Webmail client
• 6: Adobe has stopped supporting acroread for Linux but okular is a very good viewer for many types of files
• 7: many people only use 1 desktop, but 4 are available by default
• 8: hover on the weather widget (which is not very stable) to get the current outside temperature

• scheduled hardware/software upgrades for Wednesday, August 14
• hardware changes:
  • more energy efficient
  • faster and more (total of 6) processor cores
  • RAM doubled to 32GB
  • more, expandable, harddisk space (default minimum user quota will be 1GB) with access to non-backed-up scratchspace on sphere
• software changes:
  • latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system (RHEL6.4)
  • this OS does not have the very latest software however it is very stable
  • TeX has switched from tetex to TeXLive, however it is not a very recent version; a newer custom TeXLive will likely be installed soon
  • the only desktop enviroment that is supported is KDE4 (which is similar to KDE3 that most people used before), ctwm is no longer used
  • the biggest (visible) change for most people will be the new KDE4 (described below)
• new KDE4 (the K Desktop Environment, Version 4)
  • the menus are configured somewhat differently than before, however almost all software (or their newer versions) are still there
  • application preferences and defaults may be different with new software so you may have to reconfigure some things if you made changes to settings
  • please see the desktop image above for a description of the new desktop