What is NetBSD/Athena?

NetBSD is a free Berkeley 4.4lite-derived operating system. It runs on multiple platforms, including Intel 386 based machines (most popular PCs), some Motorola 68000-based machines (including Amigas, HP300's, sun3's and some Macintoshes), and SPARCs.

Currently, active ports include the VAX, PMAX, Alpha, Amiga, Atari, and i386 architectures.

NetBSD/Athena is a port by SIPB of most of the software neccessary to present what is generally known as the Athena environment. This includes AFS, Kerberos, Hesiod, Zephyr, Moira, as well as many programs and utilities used on Athena machines. It has been designed to install easily on top of a already-existing NetBSD distribution.

How is NetBSD/Athena different from a cluster Athena workstation?

Much third-party software which Athena pays money for is either unavailable for i386-based platforms, or Athena has not licensed for those platforms. While we expect this to change, applications like Framemaker and Autocad are unavailable.

Nevertheless, we're slowly getting there. As of the the fall 1995 term, Xess, Maple, and Matlab are available.

To some extent this problem can be solved by running such third-party software on other machines remotely. Preferably a private workstation, but using the Athena X dialup (athena-x.dialup.mit.edu) is also feasable.

So what can I run?

Most everything not listed above, including:

MH: xmh, exmh, inc, show, scan, comp, repl, etc..
Emacs; all of the emacs packages normally available on athena are there *.
Graphics packages: xv, xli, xview, xpaint, netpbm / pbmplus, etc.
WWW browsers: Mosaic, Netscape, Arena, and others.
Discuss clients: discuss, dsgrep, edsc, etc.
Zephyr clients: zwrite, zwgc, xzewd, xzwrite, zaway, etc.
Kerberos clients: kinit, klist, telnet, rlogin, rsh, etc.
Andrew Toolkit applications: ez, ahelp, ezview, ezprint, etc.
AFS client utilities: pts, vos, fs, bos, aklog, etc.
Moira clients: blanche, moira, listmaint, mrtest, etc.
GNU software : gcc, g++, gdb, emacs, ghostview, etc.
"consult" software : olc, findhost, lastlog, etc.
Tools from many other lockers, including games, tcl, sipb, outland, infoagents, mime, pgp, and anything else people will help us port.

Conveniently, it requires no extra effort to obtain and use these programs. As soon as you have installed NetBSD/Athena all of them are at your fingertips, in exactly the same manner as you use them on a workstation-formerly-known-as-public.

Links:

NetBSD/Athena homepage

Next topic: