From: P. Sivera
                                                        Date: 12 Mar 2003



              VLT COMMON SOFTWARE "APR2003" - OVERVIEW
              ========================================

The APR2003 release is an external release and it will be distributed
to consortia (CDs with OS, VLTSW sources and manuals).

The release notes for APR2003 reflect only the move from MAR2002 to APR2003.
To have a complete picture of the changes from previous releases, have a 
look at the page: 
    http://www.eso.org/projects/vlt/sw-dev/vltsw/index.html

As of APR2003, version 10.20 of the HP-UX operating system is no longer 
supported and CCSLite or NOCCS are the possible types of VLTROOT to be 
installed. Furthermore, the OS changes for HP-UX 11.00 and the fact that
we moved on from Solaris 6 to Solaris 8 make a simple upgrade from previous 
VLTSW releases impossible: the operating system (HP-UX or Solaris) needs to
be re-installed. Please follow instructions in the 
"VLT Common Software - Combined OS Installation Manual"
(VLT-MAN-ESO-17200-2238 issue 3)


Supported Platforms
--------------------

               O.S.         	TORNADO           

   CCSlite  HP-UX 11.00     	2.0.2  (68k&PPC) 
   CCSlite  Sun    5.8      	2.0.2  (68k&PPC)
   CCSLite  Linux* RedHat 7.3	custom version

   NOCCS    HP-UX 11.00     	  -          
   NOCCS    Sun    5.8      	  -         
   NOCCS    Linux Red Hat 7.3	  -	


  REMARK:
  Up to now the only hardware platform accepted by Paranal as target 
  workstation is HP (currently with HP-UX 11.00 and CCS-lite) and 
  consequently this is the standard platform to be used for development
  as well. For more details, see the "Preface" section of these release
  notes.


Features 

1. CCS, RTAP and HP10.20 have been dropped and will no longer be supported

2. CCSLite and NOCCS will be the only VLTROOT-type available for SUN 
   and HP-UX 11.00
 
3. The compiler version has changed: we have gcc 3.2.1
   The GNU make version has also changed: we moved to make 3.79

4. tcltk: see the Release Notes for tcltk

5. VxWorks Tornado 2.0.2: No major changes from MAR2002

6. JAVA platform: JDK 1.4

7. MIDAS: 02SEPpl1.3




Distribution
------------

The release will be distributed to external sites upon request.


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