Dear Faculty, Staff, Postdocs and Students of the Chemistry Department:

From now on, Computer Support will try to create this newsletter on a
regular basis to keep you up to date on what's going on and what we're
working on. We'll try to keep this as short as possible. When we get a
chance, we'll revamp Computer Support's Web Pages and present more
information in an easy-to-use form.



IMPORTANT FOR USERS OF THE THREE RS6000 WORKSTATIONS IN 2105NW:

Users of the three RS6000 Unix workstations in the graduate computer lab
know that these computers have been plagued with "screen freezes" for a
long time.  Computer Support has been aware of the problem and has been
actively seeking solutions.

Shortly after Christmas, we upgraded the operating system on nobelium, the
middle computer (from AIX 4.1.4 to AIX 4.3). With this upgrade came a new
windowing system, CDE (Common Desktop Environment); this is why it "looks
different" now. We also upgraded Cerius and Spartan. All of these steps
seemed to only aggravate the problem.

Yesterday we installed several patches to the operating system on mendelevium
(left) and lawrencium (right computer). We hope these will solve the problems.
We're still working on nobelium.

IT IS THEREFORE IMPORTANT that freezes on mendelevium and lawrencium now be
reported to Computer Support. Thank you for your assistance.  Look to the
"Support Bulletins" (found in the trailers of our web pages) for the complete
story in the near future.