Unix setup ---------- * look at SuSE -> Mandrake business, a la Tim's message. - why is the KDE stuff (dot-files, Desktop,...) and /var/tmp/ group-writeable for "staff"? (defined how?!) (and there are some stupid "~/.[0-9]*" files that are *writeable by other*! Are they by imap2, or what?!) - X setup seems to vary a bit from occasion to occasion! (e.g. xterm key bindings / scrollbar; KDE taskbar.) - sort puts aa before /bb, Houssenaly before Ho Von! (i.e. it ignores non-alphanumeric characters, or something like that!) Why?! * Linux: * sysbin stuff and . (!!!) are on the default path! * the little yellow descriptive messages that used to appear when you hover over an icon in the KDE panel wondering what the hell it might be, no longer appear! * xlock doesn't lock out fresh server connections, for what it's worth. More seriously, when a giant condor job starts up, xlock (and/or a random subset of processes generally) can be killed but the X-session underneath it left alive! Presumably this means anyone can ["probabilistically"] unlock a terminal by malloc'ing a lot of memory! * rootxv doesn't work. Is there some subtle change in how to get xv to place things on the root window etc? * can we have "set mail = ~/.email" system-wide, or lab-wide? - it controls "You have [new] mail" in tcsh, which is useful since the students no longer run xbiff or equivalent by default. * can we have accounting (lastcomm, etc.) and vi-recovery? Also the finger and talk daemons would be nice. (Mark says they have security holes - but surely *some* bug-free versions exist in the world? They are after all very popular "internet infrastructure" utilities!) * although dvidvi in the lab area is working OK, it might be a good idea to get it installed at systems level, like the rest of the TeX/LaTeX/dvi/ps tools. * surely our friendly "user@host% " prompt doesn't deserve smashing?! (It's now gone back to the default "host% ".) * FreeBSD: * mail still looks in wrong place and thinks there's no mail, and still sends to the wrong place (local machine's /var/mail!) without "@doc.ic.ac.uk" in address. * Solaris and FreeBSD: * can the nice "xterm swaps back to previous screen contents" behaviour of vi and less on the Linux machines be reproduced here?