[Macpartners] Mac OS X 10.3 Release Effort Underway

[Albert Willis]

Overview
--------
Today Information Systems announces the process to support Mac OS X 
10.3 "Panther" is underway. Mac OS X 10.3 is the latest version of Mac 
OS X released by Apple on October 24th. New Macs purchased after this 
date ship with Mac OS X 10.3 pre-installed.

Mac OS X 10.3 has many new features of interest to the MIT community:

   -- Kerberos for Macintosh 5.0; more built-in network applications are 
now Kerberized, including SSH
   -- new and faster version of the Finder
   -- improved system performance
   -- improved support for SMB printing and file servers
   -- support for Active Directory authentication
   -- PostScript to PDF conversion
   -- X Windows support
   -- latest Unix technologies: improved NFS, FreeBSD 5 commands and 
libraries, latest scripting languages

Apple has documented many of the 150 new features of Mac OS X 10.3 at  
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/.

During the release process, the team will address documentation, 
training, application testing, configuration and deployment.

Support Status
--------------
Information Systems has begun gearing up to support Mac OS X 10.3; 
however, support will be on a “best effort” basis for the initial 30 
days of availability. Members of the MIT community that choose to 
upgrade during this period will be “on their own” and expected to use 
self-support resources such as e-mail lists and the world wide web if 
they encounter problems. The e-mail list macosx-help at mit.edu is a 
public list for users to help each other; members of lists such as Mac 
Partners may also use those for help.

Information Systems recommends that users that require a greater level 
of support should delay upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3 until Information 
Systems announces test results and additional support resources.

Users that purchase new machines with Mac OS X 10.3 pre-installed will 
be able to receive support for configuring their machines to connect to 
MITnet, print to networked printers and connecting to file servers. 
This information is available at http://itinfo.mit.edu/product?vid=592.

We will send updates throughout the process. For more information on 
Mac OS X 10.3 and the release effort, see the Mac OS X Release Notebook 
at http://web.mit.edu/swrt/releases/macosx. If you have questions, 
suggestions, or would like to participate in the release of Mac OS X 
10.3, please contact the team via email at macosx-release at mit.edu.


Al Willis for the Mac OS X Release Team
   Deb Bowser
   Yang Gu
   Janet Littell