Hi Folks,

I've been testing SL4-RC2 and I've noticed a few minor problems (at 
least for our users) that were carried in from my testing on fedora core 
3.  Feel free to take or leave any of the fix RPMS I've made:

First, the eggcups printing notification has been arguably busted from 
FC3 onward, mostly because of a fundamental change in the way printing 
operations are handled.  If you don't configure your cups server to 
allow any anonymous user to query all the jobs on the print server 
(which we think is a security concern), the job status will not be 
returned and the job will show up with an "unknown" status.  There is 
also no button to clear the job queue, so jobs stack up indefinitely. 
Because of these reasons, I contend that this feature is arguably 
busted, and choose to disable the eggcups panel icon completely.  I do 
this with the following RPM and SRPM I've created:

http://www.math.ku.edu/os/rhel4_addons/SL_disable_print_notification-1.0-2.noarch.rpm
http://www.math.ku.edu/os/rhel4_addons/SRPMS/SL_disable_print_notification-1.0-2.src.rpm

Second, terminal emulation when using gnome-terminal is broken.  Parts 
of lines 'stick' to the screen when scrolling in nano, mutt, ispell, and 
possibly other programs.  Redhat apparently doesn't think it's a problem 
since they have provided no fix for either FC3 or RHEL4.  I obtained the 
following RPMS/SRPMS from rawhide to fix the problem:

http://www.math.ku.edu/os/rhel4_addons/vte-0.11.12-1.el4.i386.rpm
http://www.math.ku.edu/os/rhel4_addons/vte-devel-0.11.12-1.el4.i386.rpm
http://www.math.ku.edu/os/rhel4_addons/SRPMS/vte-0.11.12-1.el4.src.rpm

Third, I just wanted to mention to anyone using MATLAB that the 
MathWorks still haven't fixed MATLAB (as of R14SP2) to where it runs 
smoothly on linux 2.6 kernels.  In order for it to run properly you will 
need to create a script to start MATLAB that sets the following 
environment variables:

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1
export BLAS_VERSION=libmwrefblas.so

Fourth, In the Gnome Volume Control, I'm currently investigating if 
there is a way package up an RPM to remove the mute on the headphones 
and the cdplayer volumes since they are muted by default when a user 
logs in.  I'll post to the list if/when I come up with an RPM to do this.

Other than these things, SL4 RC2 runs great.  Thanks!

Greg

-- 

Gregory Harris
Network Specialist
Department of Mathematics
The University of Kansas
[log in to unmask]
(785) 864-7311