You should be able to use your Debathena machine to run all your favorite Athena commands. We recommend using the renew command as a convenient way to authenticate to Athena (rather than kinit -54 followed by aklog). After running renew and getting credentials, you should be able to run (e.g.) cd /mit/tabbott and access your Athena locker. If you don’t know how to use Athena, we recommend reading the Athena pocket reference.
A machine running debathena-login should function essentially like the Debathena dialup server linerva.mit.edu, modulo some special dialup security features that are not included in debathena-login.