[2619] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2000-02-28 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Feb 28 14:52:16 2001
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 14:52:12 -0500
Message-Id: <200102281952.OAA17589@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Attending: wdc jweiss miki ghudson ajfox othomas amb rbasch tbelton aurora
1. Internationalization
A user asked for better support for internationalization. We can do
specific things on a time-available basis, but really doing a good job
would require probably 30% of an EFT over time, more initially, and we
don't have those resources.
2. xscreensaver
The current xscreensaver setup doesn't work so well in electronic
classrooms (people leave themselves logged in and the next people come
in to find screens locked but not yet allowing a logout), or for
certain private machines. We're not sure what good options are, but
they might look like:
* Don't run xss on machines which have a file in /etc or which
are listed in a file in AFS (for electronic classroom
machines). "xlock" would still work (it would run xss
-start-locked), but screens wouldn't save and lock
automatically.
This would let us bring some machines back to the old state
of affairs, where people who leave themselves logged in
don't have their screens locked at all. It is easy to
implement, though.
* Tweak xss resources so that machines in electronic
classrooms allow logouts immediately. This may be harder to
implement (it might be as easy as loading the resource into
the X server on certain machines in the default dotfiles).
The xss lockup bug makes the current situation particularly annoying.
3. Dell GX150 plans
[The minutes-taker's understanding may be a little off here.]
The onboard sound on the GX150 isn't supported by Red Hat 6.2.
Neither is the Turtle Beach sound card Dell likes to sell. We can
convince Dell to sell us the current sound card which we have in the
GX110s, but it's a pain. We don't know if Red Hat 7 will have better
support for any of these options. Andrew should find out.
4. Sun partitioning
We're going with 1GB of swap for disks with sizes of roughly 20GB.
We'd like to know whether there is a point of diminishing returns for
AFS cache size; in the meantime, we are making more or less arbitrary
decisions about AFS cache size.
5. Museum plans
The MIT museum wants a machine which allows anyone to log in but only
lets them run a web browser and only lets them go to MIT locations.
They were considering using Athena for this purpose; we don't think
it's a good match.
