At our meeting on the CUE Environment earlier this week, we discussed this
very issue. The consensus of the group was that we would in the first
early implementation go as planned, but once we have good tools in place
(rdist or other software distribution tool) that we could easily implement
distributing directories like /usr/local. We also realize we need to
look closely into compilers, license managers, and where to locate /opt.
Again, this may for performance reasons as well as licensing, be something
we want to distribute to locally attached disks.
>Mail:
>This is the thing that all users use all the time (and so complain about
>the most!) and I think it's important to have a robust system. You mention
>the use of elm amongst others. Although elm is very popular it is no
>longer supported by it's authors and has some serious security problems.
>I think pine is a good replacement and will work from any terminal. Pine
>also comes with an IMAP package - both server and client.
>
>Although I personally do not use pine most of the group here does.I use
>several IMAP client programs to access mail on the central mail servers.
>I think pine (or Netscape mail in version 3.x) would probably meet the
>needs of the vast majority of users. Pine also understands and handles
>MIME formats.
We will definitely look into pine and in fact think we should down the
road pull together a small task force to consider mailers carefully.
>Window managers, CDE etc.:
>I have no experience with CDE, but I have heard rumours that it is
>fairly heavy on memory. What happens to the server with lots of users
>running CDE sessions on their X terminals? We use the fvwm window
>manager here for precisely that reason - it is very easy on resources, but
>is very easy to use and configure. Of course it is not a complete
>environment (really should be compared with Mwm rather than CDE).
This sounds like a good alternative. I think there are a few folks on
the site already using this. As I understand it, it may not provide the
full desktop capability that some users may want, however it might be
a very good alternative to provide.
Thanks for all your comments!
Rita