Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
14 February 2005

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released today. You can download your copy from our RHEL support page. This version includes numerous changes including the Linux 2.6 kernel and Security Enhanced Linux. You may want to familiarize yourself with these concepts before upgrading your RHEL 3 system. RHEL 4 supports numerous hardware platforms including:

* Intel x86-compatible (32bit)
* Intel Itanium (64bit)
* Advanced Micro Devices AMD64 (64bit) and Intel EM64T
* IBM POWER series (eServer iSeries and eServer pSeries)
* IBM Mainframe (eServer zSeries and S/390)

Desktop improvements include the Firefox web browser, Evolution 2.0 for email, calendaring, and contact management, OpenOffice.org office suite, GAIM instant messenger, The GIMP v.2 image tool, and Vino VNC. Red Hat Desktop 4 also includes RealPlayer 10 for SMIL, MP3, Flash, and RealAudio/RealVideo support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is the first commercial product to include Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). SELinux is a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) security system for Linux, which allows finer-grain control over which users and what processes can access the filesystem. By default, a targeted policy is enabled. The default targeted policy affects the following daemons only: dhcpd, httpd, mysqld, named, nscd, ntpd, portmap, postgres, snmpd, squid, and syslogd.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux site subscription
01 August 2004

We are please to announce that UTA is finalizing a site subscription service that will allow unlimited use of RHEL AS and WS on university owned computer systems, and RHEL WS to students for personal use. As details emerge, I'll post more information to this board.

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Using the Vim editor
25 November 2003

On most Linux distributions (and many Unix distributions), the command "vi" is actually an alias or symbolic link to the Vim editor, which stands for Vi IMproved.

"Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files." -- vim.org

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Ximian Evolution: Exporting your Outlook data
11 November 2003

In the second installment of our series on Using Evolution at UTA, we'll briefly discuss importing your Exchange personal folders (PST files) into Evolution. Beacause .pst files are formatted in a proprietary way, requiring access to the MAPI.DLL library which can only be read by applications running in Windows, they must first be converted into a format readable by other applications, the standard mbox file. We'll review two methods for achieving this, and provide detailed instructions for doing so.

Microsoft introduced us to .pst files with the deployment of Exchange Server 4.0 as a way to maintain copies of messages locally, on the client computer, rather that storing all messages on the Exchange server, and as a storage format for users who do not have access to a Microsoft Exchange Server (for example those using Microsoft Outlook to retrieve mail from a POP3 server) . More information can be found in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 208480.

Two applications that can convert your .pst files to mbox format for you are Outport and Mozilla. You will need to run these applications under Windows, before you upgrade your system to Linux. We'll discuss them both:

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Ximian Evolution: An Introduction
28 October 2003

This article, the first in a series on using Evolution at UTA, will briefly discuss some features of Evolution and its interoperability with email servers, including Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003. The next article in this series will discuss importing your Exchange personal folders (PST files) into Evolution. We'll conclude this series with articles on integrating anti-spam filters into your Evolution setup and installing and using the Ximian Connector to access Exchange 2000 or 2003 servers.

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