[Linux-users] Status of Linux Project

[Ari Pollak]

[ Sorry for cross-posting again, many people not on linux-users were
wondering about this ]

Many people have asked about when the Linux machines will be back up and
running. The short answer is when they're ready. The slightly extended
answer is that we hope do have this done by Spring semester, but there may
be other mitigating factors involved before that can happen. I'd like to
have them up as much as anyone else, but some important decision-making
stuff needs to be taken care of first. All of the people I've talked to &
talks attended at the LISA conference have certainly assisted in making an
even better Linux project closer to reality.

The longer answer:

After having some extensive meetings with the Systems staff (there will be
many more meetings to come), these are our current issues, and there are a
lot of them on our plate at the moment.

The first re-do concentrated on making Linux pretty, which we've already
done, above and beyond our original expectations. What we didn't do was
actually think about the right way to do things in the CCIS environment,
which is the challenging part and what we're doing now.

A lot of behind-the-scenes work is being done to make everything much
cleaner and better organized, as well as being able to recover cleanly
should anything bad happen to the configuration data.

A new Debian GNU/Linux release is currently scheduled for December 1st.
While we're probably not going to be held up should that release be
delayed, we're aiming for our release to coincide with soon after the
Debian release. Our new system mandates that only very core pieces of the
OS will be installed from the distribution, but it is expected that using
this new release will make future upgrades much smoother.

The first machines under the new system will be limited to an internal
testing/QA group at first, then to Crew,

Pete & I are very open to suggestions and would like to hear any input you
can contribute to this project. We certainly don't know everything, and
it's difficult at times to be both admin & user. If there's anything you'd
really like to see this time around that wasn't there before, or what we
can do to improve reliability for you, please let us know.