DESY Scientifix Linux 6 - SLD6

Scientific Linux 6.1 was released on July 28, 2011, for 32 and 64 bit architectures. At DESY, currently only the 64 bit version of SL6 is available. See the DESY scientific linux pages for more information on Scientific Linux at DESY.

Installation

Talk to our group administrator. Currently this is Eduard Avetisyan.

Make sure that the data on your /scratch disk is backed up somewhere.

SLD5 -> SLD6 issues

A few things that might come in handy when switching from SLD5 to SLD6:

MS fonts like Arial might be missing. Unfortunately, a few programs (for example acroread) choose really weird substitute fonts in their place...
Solution: ask an admin to install the msttcorefonts package.
If gv causes trouble (like complaining about outdated profiles and refusing to start), try one of the following commands
```
gv-update-userconfig  
```
or
```
mv ~/.gv ~/.gv_old  
```
The contents of system dependent directories (like the kde Desktop folder) do not show up in the folders of the new version automatically.
Example: to copy the files that were in the desktop folder under SLD5 32 bit to the folder in SLD6 64 bit:
```
cp  ~/.i586_rhel50/KDesktop/* ~/.amd64_rhel60/KDesktop/ 
```
The same works for kde autostart entries, e.g. if you have a script to switch keyboard layouts:
```
cp ~/.i586_rhel50/.kde/Autostart/source-my-keyboard-switch.sh ~/.amd64_rhel60/.kde/Autostart/ 
```

If you can't get any ROOT versions via the ini command, you can use the one in /opt by setting something like:

export ROOTSYS=/afs/desy.de/SL/6/x86_64/opt/root/5.28.00  
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ROOTSYS/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH   
export PATH=$ROOTSYS/bin:$PATH

Thunderbird might ask for a master password after the switch ("Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device"), even though no master password was ever set. According to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, this is a known bug that can happen when updating from 2.0.0.24 to Thunderbird 3.*. Try this solution:
```
rm ~/.thunderbird/<*.default>/key3.db 
```
(where <*.default> is the profile name - in most cases, you'll only have one profile directory in ~/.thunderbird)
If Thunderbird has problems handling attachments, e.g. opening pdfs with acroread doesn't work properly anymore, try the Thunderbird addon OpenAttachmentByExtension (not sure if this is in any way related to the switch to SL6, but that's when this problem appeared).