[2219] in Release_7.7_team
8.4 Athena beta for IRIX
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Apr 16 14:39:50 2000
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 14:39:39 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200004161839.OAA05480@small-gods.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: f_l@MIT.EDU, athena-rcc@MIT.EDU, zacheiss@MIT.EDU, rbasch@MIT.EDU,
mbarker@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
The Athena 8.4 alpha test phase begins tonight for the IRIX platform.
(Unless I have to cancel it; I'm doing a final test now to make
absolutely sure that a machine can take the update and come up okay.
I'm pretty sure it will work.)
The Athena 8.4 release uses IRIX 6.5.7. The update involves a
miniroot thing, so it might take a little while.
I don't have a list of new things prepared for the alpha release yet,
or draft release notes; when there are draft release notes, they will
be in /afs/dev.mit.edu/project/relnotes/rel84.tex. tetex is probably
the most user-visible upgrade for 8.4.
Even if your machine is configured with AUTOUPDATE true, it will not
take the 8.3 alpha release automatically. To take the release
manually, do a console login as root (type Control-p at the xlogin
window and log in as root using the text login display) and run:
detach -O -a
attach -O dev-sgisys-84
/srvd/update_ws
# Watch, or go do something else for five minutes or so.
shutdown -y -i6 -g0
Alpha test is only appropriate for machines which can be reinstalled
without nonrecoverable damage. During this phase of testing, the
release may eat your machine, although I hope it won't. Also, not all
changes to the system packs will be reflected in update version
scripts, so during the testing period you could wind up with a machine
slightly inconsistent with how it should be. The system packs can and
hopefully will be completely rebuilt every few days, which can cause
long-running processes like emacs and rlogin to dump core.
Please report any bugs you find to testers@mit.edu.
Here is a list of alpha SGI machines and their contacts:
Machine name Contact
------------ -------
andrew f_l
augmented f_l
baloo athena-rcc,zacheiss
cheshire-cat athena-rcc,zacheiss
horton rbasch
megara mbarker
science-fiction-double-feature zacheiss
