SIPB Installer for Athena Linux Coming Soon

Linux is a freely distributable implementation of UNIX. At MIT, our
public computer clusters run a standard set of software known as
Athena.  You may have noticed Linux-Athena workstations in the public
clusters.  These are Intel X86-based workstations running a port of
Athena to the Red-Hat distribution of Linux that is maintained by
Information Systems. The software that they are running is available
to the MIT community, but it is not currently easy to install it on
hardware which is not identical to that which is in the clusters.

SIPB is working to correct this by modifying the installer
shipped with Red Hat linux to install the appropriate packages for our
environment.  We had hoped to have this installer ready in time for the
start of the academic year, but in fact it is still in testing, and
should be ready in a few weeks.

In the past, SIPB has released its own version of Athena to run on Redhat
and NetBSD.  This version of Athena is out of date and runs on old versions
of Redhat.

If you'd like to hear about it when the installer is ready, subscribe
yourself to the mailing list, {\tt linux-announce}, by running, at the
{\tt athena%} prompt, {\tt blanche linux-announce -a $USER}.

If you are buying a computer, and thinking of running linux on it, you
can buy a machine just like the cluster ones, or you can look at the list of
PCs that MIT recommends for Windows users, which are all good choices.  See
{\tt http://web.mit.edu/is/desktop/saws_configs.html} for the cluster configuration,
and
{\tt http://web.mit.edu/is/desktop/pcadmin.html} for the list of supported hardware.
If you just need to buy an ethernet card,
follow the link at the bottom of that page.

If you'd like to learn more about Red Hat Linux, on Athena, run {\tt
attach linux} and look through the documents in the directory {\tt
/mit/linux/docs/}.  Among the documentation you will find there, you
should find the Hardware-HOWTO, that is, a list of hardware that Linux
can run on.

Meanwhile, we'd still like to hear from you.  Feel free to stop by the
office and ask any questions you might have, or email {\tt sipb@mit.edu}.