Debathena release notes

This page documents the major changes between the Sarge-only packages from 2006 and the current release.

Ubuntu and Etch support

Debathena now supports all current releases of Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux.

64-bit support

Debathena now supports the amd64 architecture.

New and substantially changed packages

We have created a number of new packages providing additional Athena-like functionality. Below are the highlights:

• debathena-discuss, debathena-xdsc, debathena-discuss-emacs: We now support discuss.
• debathena-ssl-certificates: We’ve packaged the various MIT-relevant SSL certificates
• debathena-firefox-extension: This package causes your Firefox to trust the MIT CA and things like that.
• debathena-msmtp-config: This package provides a script that you can use to send authenticated email through outgoing.mit.edu. It can be used in place of sendmail with programs such as pine.
• debathena-delete: Just in case anyone uses it.
• debathena-dotfiles: We’ve packaged the user template and system standard shell dotfiles for Athena, for use in Linerva-like integrated environments.
• debathena-ldap-config: This package configures a machine to default to MIT’s LDAP server, ldap.mit.edu.
• debathena-finger-config, debathena-from-config, debathena-quota-config: We’ve moved the Athena from, quota, and finger binaries so that they have names NAME.debathena, so that these packages do not conflict with the Debian packages providing from, quota, and finger. Installing one of these packages will divert aside the Debian version and replace it with the Debathena version.
• debathena-debian-dev: A package which depends on a number of useful programs for developing Debian packages.
• debathena-build-depends: A package which provides all the dependencies necessary to build Debathena.
• debathena-console: The Athena console program. This is part of an ongoing effort to make Debathena able to replicate the look and features of an Athena workstation.
• debathena-athena-libraries: This package has been restructured to automatically detect the set of libraries that are useful for running software out of Athena lockers. The previous version installed many unecessary libraries.

Software for fully Athenized Debathena machines

We no longer maintain modified versions of libpam-krb5 and libpam-openafs-session. Instead, we have written a new PAM modules libpam-krb524 that has the functionality of our changes to libpam-krb5, and a new module libpam-athena-locker which improves on libpam-openafs-session in an environment where users might have home directories in cells other than the Athena cell.

We’ve written a total of 3 PAM modules and 2 NSS modules that are useful for running a Debathena machine which gets account information from Hesiod (and thus has an account for every Athena user, and home directories in AFS). For more about these, see the Debathena hacks page.

Clean source packages

Debathena now builds packages that come from Athena sources from sources obtained from Athena CVS, rather than tarballs created from /mit/source/athena. We have removed the ugly CVS tags from the source tarballs. All of our packages (except for the modified versions of Debian packages like tcsh, bash, and krb5) use CDBS, the Common Debian Build System, which means that the debian/rules files are 5 lines, rather than 100. We also wrote a CDBS module for our dpkg-divert hack so that we would not have the same code duplicated 15 times. It is available from the debathena-config-build-common package.

Multiple repository components

The debathena repository has been split into multiple components to make it easier to select what parts of debathena you wnat on your machine.

Prebuilt OpenAFS modules

We have added a new openafs component which contains OpenAFS kernel module binaries built for each of the stock kernels in the supported distributions

Obtaining the old packages

The packages from the older Sarge-only release are available in the following APT repository:

deb http://stuff.mit.edu/~debathena/apt-old sarge debathena
deb-src http://stuff.mit.edu/~debathena/apt-old sarge debathena