We are currently (March, 2002) upgrading the CABI linux workstations from RedHat Linux 6.2
to SuSE Linux 7.3. Users should be aware of various points:
Logging in the first time:
When you log into a SuSE Linux machine for the first time you will be asked to configure KDE,
the desktop environment. That is because SuSE 7.3 uses a newer version of KDE than does RedHat 6.2.
The previous version of KDE used subdirectories called .kde and Desktop which stored various
application settings. The new version uses directories called .kde2 and KDesktop.
Your old settings for RedHat 6.2 will be kept, so you can later log into a RedHat 6.2 system.
I've gone back and forth between Redhat 6.2 and SuSE 7.3 systems and haven't had a problem.
Application settings:
If you have bookmarks for the konqueror web browser that you want to keep
for the new version of linux, you need to copy them from the old .kde to the
new .kde2:
Easy mounting/unmounting of removable media:
The desktop has icons for the CD-ROM drive, the floppy drive, and the Jaz drive.
To mount, unmount, or eject a drive, you can right-click the appropriate icon.
Note that these drives are mounted in /media rather than /mnt. If you want to mount a jaz drive from
the unix command line, for example, you can type
mount /media/jaz
New applications: New applications on our SuSE 7.3 systems include
Slicer - a 3D image visualization program
Mozilla, Opera - two more web browsers (besides Netscape and Konqueror)
Mozilla is an open source version of Netscape
Opera is relatively fast and has a built-in instant messenger; it is commercial software,
so you get banner ads
Flash - both Netscape and Konqueror support FLASH
DDD, lclint - tools for C/C++ programming
DDD is the Data Display Debugger, a graphical frontend for GDB, the Gnu Debugger,
for debugging C and C++ programs
lclint is used to find errors in C programs
StarOffice 5.2 - Sun's suite of office applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation,
drawing, web editing, to-do organizer)
StarOffice can read and write files in Microsoft Office format (Word, Excel, Powerpoint). However,
it is not as polished as Microsoft Office. It can be useful if you are on a linux PC and need to take
a quick look at a Word document for example.
Quanta Plus - an HTML editor for designing web pages
MuPAD, Octave - computer math tools
MuPAD lets you do symbolic math on the computer (like Mathematica or Maple)
Octave is a high-level interactive language for numerical calculations (like MATLAB)
New libraries: New libraries on our SuSE 7.3 systems include
LAPACK, BLAS, FFTW - numerical analysis libraries
LAPACK is the Linear Algebra PACKage
BLAS is the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines package
FFTW is a library of C subroutines for calculating Fast Fourier Transforms
Motif - a set of graphics libraries (Motif is now free)
