All-
I reinstalled my personal AlphaStation about a week ago, and I thought I
would share some of my observations about Digital Unix 4.0 with the list.
1) I downloaded the firmware update from Digital's web site, created a bootable
floppy using `mkbootfirm', and upgraded my firmware on my machine that way.
The process went fine, and the SRM console verified correctly. As explained
by a Digital engineer in comp.unix.osf.osf1, the ARC console verify will
`fail', but it's not cause for concern.
After the SRM console update, now when I halt my machine to the firmware
>>> prompt, I get an additional message that never appeared before:
CP - SAVE_TERM routine to be called
CP - SAVE_TERM exited with hlt_req=1; r0=00000000.00000000
I'm not sure if this is normal or not. I suspect not, but I don't believe
it's caused me any major problems yet.
2) The install process is really quite nice. The graphical configuration
is both easy and somewhat more powerful than the 3.2c configuration process.
The only two areas I had problems with were:
a) the graphical disk partitioning utility. I struggled with trying to
make it do what I wanted for a few minutes and finally just exited to
a root shell and repartitioned my disks via `disklabel'.
b) the mail configuration utility gave three choices for system types,
my type being `standalone'. Selecting that as the system type for mail
left me with nothing to configure (and nothing that I could screw up), yet
mail to my system did not work; Digital's sendmail gave me the `hostname
not recognized as local' error. This may be because I set my machine's
hostname to be just `dogbert', not the hostname + FQDN. I did try changing
the Cw macro in the sendmail.cf, but I could not find a combination that
would alleviate the problem. In any case, I had been planning on
upgrading to sendmail 8.7.5; this just made me upgrade quicker than
expected.
3) So far I've only had to recompile a few things, including:
a) sudo 1.4 - I switched to enhanced security with 4.0, and sudo 1.4
does not work correctly with enhanced security under 4.0. I contacted
Todd Miller about it, and he's currently testing a new version of sudo
that does work correctly with C2 under 4.0. I suspect it will be released
shortly.
In addition, as mentioned in another message to this list, Digital forgot
to ship /usr/include/acl.h, which is included by /usr/include/prot.h
(which many things that are C2-aware include). Digital knows about the
problem and it has been fixed for an upcoming OS release but there is
apparently no plan to release a patch for 4.0. The problem
can be easily fixed, though:
cd /usr/include
ln -s /usr/sys/include/sys/acl.h acl.h
b) xlockmore 3.8- recompile necessary for enhanced security, but I believe
xlockmore is interacting badly with Digital's X server. On more than
one occasion I've returned to my office to see xlockmore running, but
not smoothly as under 3.2c. Whatever screensaver is running is very
`jerky' and the machine response is quite bad. In each case, I've run
`top' and found Xdec consuming CPU at an alarming rate. Switching
workspaces in dtwm after this happens will generally crash the X server
and bring me back to dtlogin.
I'm not sure yet where the fault lies, but something causes Xdec to
get into the CPU-consuming state. The machine basically becomes unusable
after this happens. Logging out (assuming X doesn't crash first) and
restaring X fixes the problem.
c) gcc-2.7.2. As mentioned on this list and elsewhere, a couple minor
changes are needed to make gcc 2.7.2 compile under 4.0. As others have
indicated, changing a typedef in gcc-2.7.2/cp/errfn.c and commenting out
a couple lines of code in gcc-2.7.2/config/alpha/alpha.c will allow gcc
to compile.
d) libg++-2.7.2 - I found it necessary to comment out the #include
<ctype.h> in Regex.cc to make it compile.
e) I've recompiled the curses-based menu program that we use on our
general purpose hosts for new users. DU 4.0 has a System V curses,
whereas 3.2c had a BSD curses. Key handling has definitely changed;
I haven't investigated fully yet but I will need to make some
modifications to the menu program to get it to work as it did under
3.2c.
4) Some of the new or updated tools are pretty nice. Among them, I like
what's been done to dtadvfs. The Account Manager tool is nice, and there
have been definite improvements made to XSysAdmin (dxaccounts) and XIsso.
5) I like the fact that the documentation is no longer in dxbook format.
HTML isn't the best, but it's a much better solution than dxbook. I also
like the fact that the manpages are shipped in compressed format now.
Hope this helps someone out,
Tim
--
Tim Mooney mooney_at_toons.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu
Information Technology Services (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Bldg. (701) 231-8541 (FAX)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105
Received on Thu Aug 01 1996 - 02:04:16 NZST