Author Archives: Chris Cooke

Recently we’ve been patching the DICE and Windows managed desktop computers to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. We’ll continue to apply patches and fixes as they become available. If you use any other sort of computer in Informatics, it’s … Continue reading →

If you sometimes struggle to remember passwords, a password manager can help. It’s a utility which can store your usernames and passwords in a strongly encrypted personal file, and which can generate random passwords for you. DICE has keepassx2. It … Continue reading →

A new version of Virtual DICE is now available for download. (Here’s how to download it.) If you don’t know what Virtual DICE is, read on. The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which … Continue reading →

Some staff and postgrads who haven’t yet had their DICE desktop upgraded to SL7 have been having trouble logging in at the start of the day, after waking their machine from sleep. We’ve been gathering evidence on this problem, but … Continue reading →

We’re delighted to announce a new release of Virtual DICE. Find out more in the Virtual DICE help pages. The download information is here. Virtual DICE is DICE Linux, but running in a virtual machine. It can run on any … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →