[90] in athena10
Debathena News
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Mon Feb 18 04:30:53 2008
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:26:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: debathena@MIT.EDU
To: debathena-announce@mit.edu
cc: sipb-office@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0801261703260.4470@yaz-pistachio.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Dear Debathena users,
This email summarizes various recent developments in the Debathena
project. Item 5 is important to be aware of if you run debathena-login.
1) The next release of Athena, Athena 10, will be an extension of the
current Debathena release running on Ubuntu Hardy Heron LTS. Athena 10 is
expected to be released this summer. SIPB's Debathena team to continue to
provide support for all modern Debian and Ubuntu platforms on i386 and
amd64, while the Athena team will maintain and support the official
hardy-i386 Athena releases. Details are available on the Athena 10
release webpage <http://web.mit.edu/release/www/athena10/>.
2) We built Debathena packages for Debian Lenny. Since Lenny hasn't
stabilized yet, it is possible that these packages might be broken by
future changes in Debian Lenny upstream. If they do, please let us know
so we can update them. Also, if you would find Hardy packages useful, let
us know at debathena@mit.edu.
3) We have a new metapackage called debathena-workstation that is an
extension of debathena-login for cluster-style graphical workstations.
It comes with an attractive new Debathena gdm login greeter, modeled after
Athena's xlogin. A screenshot is available at
<http://debathena.mit.edu/gdm-greeter-screenshot.png>. Various other
enhancements for debathena-workstation are in the pipeline, including an
analogue for the Athena "logout" command and a firefox wrapper that will
handle Firefox lockfiles the way Athena does. If you run a cluster-style
graphical workstation, you should install it.
4) The debathena-standard class of packages now support the "add" and
"renew" commands. Also, locker software (like Matlab) that used to only
work in debathena-login should now run correctly in debathena-standard
configurations.
5) Various updates were made to the debathena-login class of packages that
should improve the security defaults. debathena-login now configures
/etc/security/access.conf to default to a private Athena workstation style
configuration where only (A) users with local accounts in /etc/passwd and
(B) users physically at the machine can login, instead of the previous
public dialup default. Unfortunately, this means that on the next
upgrade, debathena-login machines will revert to this safe configuration
(saving the old configuration in
/etc/security/access.conf.debathena-orig). We apologize for this
inconvenience.
-Tim Abbott
