[295] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jul 2 16:22:58 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
Cc: jdreed@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200807021855.m62Itmrh001636@dit.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:22:08 -0400
Message-Id: <1215030128.4661.11.camel@equal-rites.mit.edu>
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On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 14:55 -0400, Alex T Prengel wrote:
> 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?).
desktop items can launch commands within terminals. It's clunky but (as
far as I know) it works.
> 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.
Yeah, I'll add setup code to the bash dotfiles at some point. But all
of the .attachrc files will have to have bash versions written.
> 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.
I don't think Ubuntu tracks Eclipse very closely, particularly if you
don't run the most recent release of Ubuntu. Right now Hardy is at 3.2
and eclipse.org is pushing 3.4.
So we'll probably want a locker install for those wanting to run the
bleeding edge. We may also want a local install for those who would
rather have better performance.
(Further complicating matters, my group will probably at some point come
out with its own MyEclipse distribution, but that's not going to happen
right away.)
> >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..
evince? It's part of more recent versions of GNOME, I think, and would
probably not be easy to install on Athena 9.4. If you have access to an
Ubuntu machine it comes up by default when you click on a PDF file.
> 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..
I'm happy to add pretty much any Ubuntu package to the cluster-software
set which works, doesn't interfere with the rest of the system, and
which we have some reason to believe is in demand.
(I still have a message from you from January on this count which I have
yet to go through; I haven't lost it.)
