The 6th minor update to the, now slightly venerable, ScientificLinux 5 (based on RHEL5 which was first released on 2007-03-15) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL5 DICE office machines with the updates to the servers following over the next few weeks. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as soon as they are available) in a controlled manner.

Although many users updated last year to F13 or have recently updated to SL6 there are still nearly 180 office users with SL5 machines, if you’re not one of those users then feel free to ignore this message.

SL5.6 was released on 2011-06-21 and since then it has been thoroughly tested in our DICE environment so we are confident that this update will not cause any issues for users. It is also already running on the LCFG-managed SL5 machines used by many other schools in the College of Science & Engineering.

As usual, to complete the update the SL5 machines require a reboot (for those interested, this is so that all processes are restarted using the new version of glibc). You will be prompted over the next few days to do the reboot at your convenience, if ignored the machine will automatically reboot overnight early next week.

Details of the package updates are available on the LCFG wiki. For further, in depth information, there are also release notes from ScientificLinux and RHEL.

SL5.6 / Computing Systems by is licensed under a