LEPP's Infrequent Computing Newsletter for March, 2007

Welcome to the second issue of LEPP's Infrequent Computing Newsletter.

We'll be using it to try to keep you up to date with the changes in LEPP's computing services and to remind you about existing services and policies that you may have forgotten about or didn't know existed.

New this month

Vista Support at Cornell: Not Yet

Here's an advance copy of a notice that soon will be arriving in your mail box:

To: Cornell Faculty, Students, and Staff
From: The IT Managers Council and the Microsoft Vista Special Interest Group
Subject: Important note on Microsoft Vista

Microsoft recently released its new operating system, "Vista." While Vista offers several benefits to users, particularly in the areas of security and ease of use, there are several academic, business, and research applications in use at Cornell that do not work as expected, or are unsupported by their vendors under the new operating system.

As a result, the Vista Special Interest Group and the IT Managers Council suggest that members of the Cornell community wait and check with their local IT support providers before upgrading their computers (or ordering new computers) with Microsoft Vista.

Students arriving this fall will expect to use their own Vista-installed computers for common Cornell applications. Consequently, application owners are working to ensure that the software students regularly use will work under Vista by August, or put viable workarounds in place.

The status of Cornell software on Vista may be reviewed at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/recommend/winvista.html

The Vista Special Interest Group:
http://itmc.cornell.edu/cornell_edu/ITMC/SIG/Vista_SIG.cfm
The IT Managers Council:
http://itmc.cornell.edu/

Vista Support at LEPP: Not Yet

Unfortunately, LEPP is in the same situation as the rest of Cornell: too many software packages which are needed to get your work done simply do not yet work under Vista and we do not know when working versions will be available. Please do not waste your time and ours by installing Vista or asking us to install Vista on systems that are essential for your work.

If you decide to install Vista on a personal, non-critical system, just for testing, please let us know of your experiences by posting to LEPP's Vista HyperNews Forum. This may be done by either sending an email to vista-lepp@hypernews.lepp.cornell.edu or using the HyperNews web interface at https://hypernews.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/cindex .

Attachment support for HyperNews at LEPP

For online forums, LEPP has deployed the SLAC HyperNews system. As of March 2007, LEPP's HyperNews server has been upgraded to v1.11-slac-75. With this upgrade, hypernews provides support for various attachments. For an introduction to HyperNews at LEPP, including a list of supported attachment types, please see https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/HyperNews.