Beta 3 update – June 4, 2014. We’ve got a couple of changes to tell you about that occurred after Beta 3 shipped.

1. Original email message suggested that you download via FTP the following file: z86VM.direct.txt   That was incorrect. It should be z86vmb3.direct.txt.

2. During the FTP process, the simplest means would be to run the FTP client directly from a z/VM session. However, we’ve found that doesn’t work. We aren’t sure if it is the FTP client on z/VM (which is our suspicion) or our FTP server. However, our FTP server does work from Windows and MacOS based systems. So what you’ll need to do is FTP from your desktop and then once downloaded there, upload them via FTP PUT commands to your z/VM system.

Each of the above have been updated in our opening email, the web site and the Operations manual available on the web site.

3. There seems to be a problem when attempting to run both the DSL and SME images on different virtual machines with the same IO server. SME requires a “hardened” mac address and the trouble shooting guide in the Appendix  C describes how to modify the system to do that. However, we didn’t realize the mutually exclusive nature of the two different Linux OS’s. This is not a proper behavior. We are looking into the solution for that now.

4. In the known problems area, we told you that Firefox that ships with DSL hasn’t been working for us. What we neglected to tell you is that Opera does work. On the DSL Desktop, you’ll see an O icon on the lower left side of the collection of desktop icons. Click on that to enjoy the Opera Browser.

5. Some customers have asked for some capacity planning and set up guidance for the different z/VM images used. Here’s how we’ve set up our images at Mantissa:

Page 29 of the Operations doc recommends 20,000 3390 cyls.

We have the following VM definitions for Beta 3:

Each x86 ID is defined with 6 Gig memory and a 10 cyl boot drive. (The 194 drive)

The I/O ID is defined with 9 Gig memory and a 10 cyl boot drive. (The 195 drive)  The x86 hard drive space (UDM) is defined on the I/O ID.  Beta 3 defines it as 10k Cyls.

The maint ID is defined with 1 Gig memory and a 10k Cyl A-disk.

We’ll update our online doc with this information within 24 hours.