[2221] in Release_7.7_team
Athena 8.4 alpha for Solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Apr 16 19:09:54 2000
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 19:09:48 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200004162309.TAA07121@small-gods.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: yak@MIT.EDU, athena-rcc@MIT.EDU, zacheiss@MIT.EDU, kretch@MIT.EDU,
jweiss@MIT.EDU, mbarker@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
The Athena 8.4 alpha test phase begins tonight for the Solaris
platform.
The Athena 8.4 release uses Solaris 7. The update involves a
miniroot, and takes on the order of an hour depending on your hardware
speed.
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 8.4 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-sun4sys-84
/srvd/update_ws
Now go have about six cups of coffee. Drink them slowly. When you
come back, the update may have handed you a shell prompt which you can
type "exit" at; then your machine will come up as an 8.4 machine.
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 sun4 machines and their contacts:
florey yak
maleficent athena-rcc,zacheiss
pinocchio athena-rcc,zacheiss
shock-treatment zacheiss
snow-goon yak
spatula-city kretch
speaker-for-the-dead jweiss
thankyou mbarker
the-colour-of-magic ghudson
