Minimal Standard Athena

Minimal Standard Athena is for the do-it-yourself customer who wants a personal Athena Workstation without the limitations and/or expense of Full Service Athena. Access to Athena software and automatic software updates are included in minimal standard Athena. Minimal Standard Athena works on a wider variety of hardware than Full Service Athena, but you must install and troubleshoot your own machine.

Advantages

• Free!
• Access to a wide range of locally developed and third party software (subject to license terms and platform availability).
• Access to our central AFS file system, and the ability to attach Athena lockers.
• Some administration duties are automatic, including system software upgrades. There is no need to maintain separate user accounts or password files on your machine.
• Standard Athena services such as mail, printing, Discuss, and Zephyr are available.
• Access to Athena On-line Consulting (OLC) for software support.
• Access to the The MIT Computing Help Desk for install support.
• A broader range of hardware and peripherals will work than for Full Service Athena.

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Disadvantages

• No basic Athena service (hotline) for installation and maintenance. You install and troubleshoot your own machine.
• No hardware maintenance service. You may be able to purchase third party hardware maintenance services, but IS&T does not provide them.
• While a broad range of peripherals and hardware will work with minimal standard Athena, full support is limited to a few recommended products. Best effort support will be provided for other hardware, but we do not guarantee we will be able to resolve your problem.
• There is no support for locally installed software and not all third-party software is compatible with Athena.
• Updates of the Athena system may include operating system upgrades that may affect or break locally installed software.
• If you opt out of Athena at some point in the future, you will have to reinstall the vendor operating system and learn to administer your own machine.

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Support

You can expect full support from Athena Consulting and Development if:

• You are running an IS&T Supported Configuration and
• You used a standard Athena installation (performed by the standard IS&T installer) and
• Any customizations you perform are limited to what is documented in the Private Athena Workstation Owner's Guide and
• You have kept your machine updated to the current major release.

If you are running hardware that is different from the IS&T Supported Configurations, but that hardware is shown supported in the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List for the current release of Red Hat Linux, you can expect that the Linux-Athena install and release will work, and that you will receive good support from Athena Consulting and Development.

If you are running a custom install (such as a dual-boot setup), an older SIPB version, or are using hardware other than the supported configuration, you can expect best-effort support from Athena Consulting and Development, but you may need to resort to other resources for help with your problem. If you choose to run only certain pieces of Athena by installing specific RPM's (a layered install) or hardware not supported by Red Hat you will receive only minimal effort support from Athena Consulting and Development and will need to rely on public Linux-community resources for most of your problem resolutions.

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Purchasing

While a wide range of hardware will work with Minimal Standard Athena, full support is available for the following configurations:

• Desktop
• Laptop
• Server

You can purchase these and other workstations at GovConnection.

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Installing

On a Linux Machine:

1. Verify that your system is compatible, ideally by choosing something from the Supported Configurations, or by making sure your hardware is listed in the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List for the current release of Red Hat Linux.
   
   
2. Follow the installation instructions on the Athena Linux version page.

On a Sun:

1. Verify that your workstation is one of the IS&T Supported Configurations.
   
   
2. Complete the registration form.
   
   Warning: On Suns, automatic-updates will fail if you do not register your workstation.
   
   
3. Follow the installation instructions.

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Fees

Minimal standard Athena is free.

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