[294] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Jul 2 14:56:33 2008
Message-Id: <200807021855.m62Itmrh001636@dit.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, jdreed@MIT.EDU, athena10@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:53:28 EDT."
<1215014008.18347.193.camel@error-messages.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:55:47 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
>gnuplot we can just install locally from the Ubuntu package repository.
Fine with me.
>DrScheme and Meep don't have menu items but seem straightforward enough;
>I just need to check when I'm in W92 today that they are GUI programs.
meep is a command-line, terminal-based application. If that means
it can't be in the menu I'm OK with that (but maybe the menu could launch
it within a terminal window?).
>Gaussian looks a bit more complicated; it has no existing menu item and
>the README.Athena instructions say to run it via setup. (Hmm, setup
>isn't supported in the bash dotfiles. That's going to be an issue in
>the coming year.)
Please keep setup if at all possible. I use it in a number of lockers that
are a considerable pain to set up without it.
>Eclipse has an Ubuntu package, and would be much faster to run from
>local disk, but the Debian/Ubuntu integration isn't as flawless as I
>would like. If the locker integration is substantially more useful for
>some reason (widely used plugins, for instance) then it might make sense
>to add a locker menu item; otherwise we should probably just install it
>locally.
I generally do a fairly minimal install (but with about 3-4 plugins that are
widely requested by users); the main issue is that's it's under rapid
development, and users always want the very latest version each semester.
If this can be done shortly before the start of each semester using the
Ubuntu package that should be OK; if not, I should probably keep doing
the locker installation.
>> One thing users may miss more is the whole courseware group; I just
>> don't know how much it matters though- you may want to run this by Jim
>> Cain (jrcain) and Molly Ruggles (ruggles) in DUE.
>There haven't been any 9.4 panel updates since September 2005, which
>makes me skeptical that we need a lot of this machinery.
OK with me- I'd still suggest checking with the DUE folks though.
>> About "Native PDF reader"- does this mean acroread, or some other Open
>> Source pdf viewer? I have a feeling most users will prefer to use
>> acroread.
>It's called evince. It's fast, it has good usability in my experience,
>I've never seen it have difficulty rendering anything, and it does
>fill-in forms (though I don't think it can save them).
OK, then I'll still keep doing the acroread locker install. Do you know
if it's already installed somewhere so I can check it out? Looked in the
obvious places but didn't find it..
There's another issue concerning a substantial set (30-40 or so) of
Open Source apps that I've been maintaining in lockers. I've already
verified that the majority of them are available as Ubuntu packages;
is there any chance they too could go in the release? I know there may
be reasons you'd prefer not to, and I can keep maintaining them in
lockers if need be; abiword and gnumeric in particular have been a
pain to build and if I could have just those it would help..
A.
