Legacy features removed from Debathena

This document lists the legacy Athena 9 features that have been removed from Debathena. Features on this list were removed because they were no longer being used, or because there was a more standard and maintainable way to accomplish the same task.

This list is divided into user-visible changes and technical changes. User-visible changes may affect the average Athena user, and technical changes are likely to primarily affect system administrators, developers, and power users.

User-visible changes

• The Sawfish window manager will no longer be available. The Sawfish window manager was introduced with Athena 9.0 in 2001. With Athena 9.4 in 2005, Sawfish was replaced by the newer Metacity window manager. At the time, some users elected to continue using Sawfish via the presence of an .athena-sawfish in the user’s HOME directory. Sawfish will no longer be a supported window manager in Athena 10.
• The Mozilla browser will no longer be available. The monolithic Mozilla browser was the Athena supported web browser from 2003-2005. We no longer support Mozilla for web browsing, and all current users are encouraged to switch to Firefox, which has been the default Athena web browser since 2005. If you were using Mozilla as an email client, you are encouraged to switch to the supported email client, Evolution. If you prefer a client from the Mozilla project, Thunderbird is also available, although unsupported by IS&T.
• Removal of access_on and access_off. If a machine was configured to allow it, users could run access_on to temporarily enable remote access to the machine, and access_off to disable it afterwards. This feature has been de-supported in Athena 10.
• Temporary home directories will no longer be available. Under Athena 9, users would receive temporary home directories if their AFS file server was unavailable. Under Debathena, users will not be able to log into Athena if their AFS file server is unavilable.
• The Console window is no longer available. The Console window in most Athena 9.4 sessions is used to display messages to users. It will be de-supported in Athena 10, and any messages from the user’s xsession will be written to ~/.xsession-errors.
• No more notification of new e-mail messages in Console window. As the Console window has been removed, users will not automatically receive notification of any new messages on the mail server. Users can run from -t -n at the shell prompt to query the mail server for any new messages.
• Certain filetypes are no longer opened by “Athena” applications. Under Athena 9.4, certain file types are opened by locker software, such as applixware, gimp, realplayer, etc. This feature will be de-supported, and file types and preferred applications will be determined by the underlying operating system.
• ~/.tcshrc will no longer be executed in addition to ~/.cshrc. This was a non-standard Athena customization. Under Debathena, ~/.tcshrc will be executed instead of ~/.cshrc, meaning users with a ~/.tcshrc file will NOT receive Athena customizations. Users should migrate the content of their ~/.tcshrc files into ~/.cshrc.mine.
• The WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable can no longer be used to select a different window manager. Ubuntu has dropped support for the WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable. Window managers should be selected from the login screen using the "Session" option. For more complex customization or for window managers that are not supported by Ubuntu, users will need to create their own ~/.xsession.

Technical changes

• Athena machines will no longer respond to requests on ports 13 (daytime) and 37 (time). This feature will be de-supported. The same information can be obtained via athinfo hostname date
• /etc/athena/rc.conf will be removed. IP address, hostname, and network device settings will be configured by the underlying operating system. The concept of “public” vs. “private” workstations (controlled by the PUBLIC setting) is largely obsolete in Debathena.
• Access control via /etc/athena/access is desupported. Access control will be via the /etc/security/access.conf file, which has a substantially different format. For more information, see the article in Hermes: How do I enable access control on Debathena?
• Most Athena machines no longer run a local caching nameserver by default. debathena-workstation and debathena-cluster run local caching nameservers, but other flavors of Debathena do not. Users wishing to run a local caching nameserver by hand can install the debathena-dns-config package.
• Using mkserv to enable remote access and other services will be desupported. Network services will be configured by the underlying operating system.
• A krb4 srvtab can no longer be used for kerberized services instead of a krb5 keytab. All kerberized services (telnetd, sshd) require a keytab.