From: E. Allaert
                                                           Date: 2003-04-02


              VLT COMMON SOFTWARE - APR2003 RELEASE - PREFACE
              ===============================================

The APR2003 VLT Common Software release has been installed on a large number 
of Paranal workstations during the second half of March 2003. This was also 
the occasion during which the Instrument Workstations have been upgraded to 
run on HP-UX 11.00, with CCS-lite - after some instrument specific tests in 
the months preceding this APR2003 VLTSW installation, and after the TCS 
workstations had made this upgrade already at the occasion of the MAR2002 
release.

This basically completes the move away from RTAP 6.70, which should be seen
in the light of the deprecation of HP-UX 10.20 by HP, and consequently also
by ESO: APR2003 no longer supports HP-UX 10.20. 

There has been a substantial effort made in testing this APR2003 on three 
different platforms: HP-UX 11.00, Solaris 8 and Linux RedHat 7.3; we are 
pleased to say that we manage to hide these platform differences from 
developers and end-users into the VLT Common Software layers. In that sense,
it is for developers largely irrelevant on which of these three platforms 
they work.

However, it should be noted that as of now (April 2003), the *only* final 
target workstation hardware approved for Paranal instrument and telescope 
control workstations is HP.  As consortia developing instrument software are
usually required to do the "Preliminary Acceptance Europe" over here on that
target workstation, it means that developing under Linux or Solaris implies
planning for a verification exercise on HP prior to the PAE.

In the meantime, we are working towards the formal acceptance of Linux as an
alternative or even replacement of HP-UX/Solaris. We hope e.g. to be able to
announce soon the availabililty of a VxWorks cross-compiler, for PowerPC and
Motorola 68000 based CPUs. Also, we are planning for more field tests of 
Linux on Paranal and La Silla, and we feel confident about their chances of
success. But as long as Linux is not formally accepted for the Observatories,
the policy for Consortia remains as outlined above: use Linux at own risk, 
and don't plan on getting it up on the mountain (yet).

                               ___oOo___