Edit: this work has now been done. To enable hardware maintenance a number of services and websites will be unavailable for a short while – read on for details. The following services and sites will be unavailable between about 10am and 11am on Tuesday 1 September, after which they’ll reappear: energy-hub.inf.ed.ac.uk Commercialisation web sites including […]

New Virtual DICE VM images are available for download. A lot of software has been updated, but the big news is that the VMs now include Java. A careful review of the licence conditions suggested that we were after all allowed to do this! Virtual DICE is the School’s DICE Linux, but running in a […]

You may remember that DICE Linux is not getting the major upgrade this summer (DICE teaching platform upgrade – postponed) that we optimistically forecast in February (Upgrade of DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 7). This post explains what’s been going on. DICE Linux is based on Scientific Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise […]

We recently added a second NX server, staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk. The first NX server, nx.inf.ed.ac.uk, is unchanged. NX is the remote graphical login facility, offering a DICE desktop from a Windows, Mac or Linux machine anywhere on the internet. staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk is for staff, research postgraduates and visitors. nx.inf.ed.ac.uk is still accessible to all Informatics users. If you […]

DICE is also available as a virtual machine. We call it Virtual DICE. It can run in a variety of environments – Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. The computing help pages give details on how to download, install and use it. Virtual DICE was previously in testing. It’s now a supported service, so please […]

We’re delighted to announce Virtual DICE. It’s like a DICE desktop, but running in a virtual machine. It’s currently in a testing phase – see below. Everybody in the School of Informatics is welcome to use Virtual DICE, but you will need your own computer, which will need (at the last count) 35GB of free […]

If you normally stay logged in to DICE overnight, read on. From Wednesday night (29 May) DICE desktops will be more likely to fall asleep. For some years our DICE desktops have slept when nobody was logged in and the computer seemed idle. From Wednesday they’ll also fall asleep even if a login session is […]

We want to save energy, so we try to ensure that DICE computers sleep when idle. The graph below shows how many DICE desktops were asleep during each hour of a recent week. It was produced by David Sterratt, and I’d like to thank him for his work on it and for his interest in […]

We now have a web page which can wake sleeping computers. It should wake most of our desktop machines (though not HP 7900 computers – see below). You can find it at wake.inf.ed.ac.uk. It seems a bad idea to let anyone on the internet wake any of our computers, so there are a few restrictions: […]

Back in August in a post entitled Macs in Informatics I asked for views on, well, Macs in Informatics, but specifically on configuring them to access DICE services, and whether we should look at trying to provide some sort of automated help with that configuration. I had an excellent response – thank you very much, […]