This fall, the PCs in CAEN student labs and the Duderstadt Center will continue to run the Windows XP operating system. CAEN plans on updating the OS with Service Pack 2 (XPSP2) just prior to either the fall or winter semester, depending on when the final release of XPSP2 is available. In addition to bug fixes, XPSP2 contains new features which are primarily security related. There are enhancements to Internet Explorer to block pop-up windows and spyware. Spyware is programming that is put in someone's computer to secretly gather information about the user and relay it to advertisers or other interested parties.

By the start of fall term, the PCs in the CAEN labs and the Duderstadt Center will also be upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The change from Red Hat 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is because Red Hat will no longer be supporting the freely available version 9. The current complement of available engineering software for Linux will be upgraded, and the computers will remain capable of running users’ software that worked under Red Hat 9.

Also beginning this fall, CAEN will start to install 64-bit capable PCs (with AMD or Intel processors) in CAEN labs. The Linux OS on these PCs will run in 64-bit mode and users will be able to compile and run 64-bit software on these machines. At this time, however, Windows will only support 32-bit computing.

The latest SunOS Operating System, Solaris 9, will be available this fall on all of the Sun workstations in the labs and on many CAEN servers. Although the majority of the improvements and changes to Solaris 9 will be behind the scenes, the addition of a new GNOME 2.0 desktop along side the traditional Common Desktop Environment (CDE), as well as the addition of numerous "freeware" software tools to /opt/sfw and /usr/sfw should be a very noticeable and welcome change. With the incorporation of numerous patches, new software products, and upgrades, CAEN's new Solaris 9 load should improve upon the functionality, performance, and security from CAEN's previous Solaris 8 load. For more information on how Solaris 9 has changed from previous releases, refer to the web documentation at wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/fcc/fcc.html and docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-3801/6mjcck328#hic.

For the Macintosh’s in the Duderstadt Center, the operating system will be upgraded from 10.2 (Jaguar) to 10.3 (Panther).