June 22, 2015

Today's topics:

Firefox Graphics Hardware Acceleration

• New releases of Firefox enable graphics hardware acceleration. If you experience slowness, strange artifacts, flashing, etc., we highly recommend disabling hardware acceleration. Please see FirefoxBrowser for instructions on how to to this.

• If you need further assistance in disabling hardware acceleration, please submit a service ticket.

Linux TeX/LaTeX Live 2015 is available!

• The TeX Live 2015 distribution is now available on all CLASSE SL6 and SL7 Linux workstations.
• TeX Live 2015 is now the default environment with the Texmaker package.
• Please see our LaTeX wiki for instructions on use and sample templates at https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/LaTeX.

Linux Adobe Flash Firefox Plugin Security update on Tuesday 23-Jun-2015

• The patched Adobe Flash Firefox Plugin Security update (version 11.2.202.466) will be pushed to all CLASSE Linux SL6 systems on Tuesday 23-Jun-2015.
• For detailed information about the security patch, please see https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsb15-11.html

PDF-XChange update Monday night-Tuesday morning, June 22-23.

• We will be updating PDF-XChange tonight. This should fix the licensing issues some have seen while trying to create pdfs. If you still see this problem on Tuesday, please let us know by submitting a service ticket.

Java Problems under Windows

• Java is not working on most CLASSE Windows computers. We've developed a workaround, but implementing it requires a lot of personal manual effort on each affected computer. Java is generally a security risk, is needed only for a limited number of tasks, and is still available under Linux. As a result, we're only addressing this problem on specific Windows computers where users have identified a need for Java. The underlying problem has been reported to both Microsoft and Oracle, but we have no way to know when they might provide a more general fix.

• If you need Java under Windows for monitoring systems or to connect to hardware, please open a ticket for each specific computer that needs to be fixed.

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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