Welcome Athena 9 users

Welcome to Debathena! You’ll find a lot of new features, as well as plenty of familiar ones. This page should help you get started.

Contents

• Your Desktop
• Removable Devices
• PDF Files
• Evolution
• Legacy Features Removed
• Private Workstations

Your Desktop

As you have probably already noticed, your desktop environment looks a bit different. Let’s compare the old Desktop and new Desktop side-by-side:

Athena 9	Debathena
(click for larger version)	(click for larger version)

As you can see, some things have moved around a bit:

• The Panel is now split between the top and bottom halves of your screen. The top panel contains menus, icons, and the date and time, while the bottom panel will contain buttons allowing you to quickly select any of the open windows on the screen.
• The “Mail” and “WWW” icons have moved to the top of the screen. You can launch Firefox by clicking on the firefox icon, and you can launch Evolution by clicking on the envelope icon.
• The “Prompt” icon has been removed. You can launch a Terminal window by going to the “Applications” menu, and choosing “Accessories”, and then “Terminal”.
• The “Logout” button with the EXIT sign has changed to the red power button icon at to the top right of the screen. Click the icon to log out, or simply type logout in a terminal window.
• The “Computer”, “Home”, and “Trash” icons have been removed from the Desktop. “Computer” is now under the “Places” menu, as is “Home Folder”. “Trash” is now accessible via the small icon of a recycling bin at the far right of the lower panel.
• The “foot” menu that used to be at the bottom left in Athena 9 is now gone, but many of the menu items are still there, divided between “Applications”, “Places”, and “System”. Popular Athena locker software is available under the “Applications” menu. It may take some time to get used to the new menu layout, but we think it’s a big improvement over a single large menu. If you do notice any menu items missing, particularly course-related ones, please let us know.

Removable devices (CDs, USB drives)

You no longer need to use su to become root in order to mount CD-ROMs and USB flash drives. After you insert a CD, DVD, or USB drive, it should show up on your Desktop, and you should be able to double-click on it and access your files. When you have finished using a removable device, simply click on the eject icon, or choose “Unmount” or “Eject” from the “File” menu, and then eject your CD or unplug your USB drive.

PDF Files

The default PDF viewer on Debathena is Evince, not Adobe Reader. In addition to PDF files, this program can also view other popular formats such as PostScript (.ps), Device Indepdent (.dvi), Tagged Image File Format (.tiff, .tif), and DjVu (.djvu, .djv). However, Adobe Acrobat Reader is still available should you need it—simply type athrun acro acroread in your Terminal window.

Evolution

Evolution, Athena’s default graphical email client, has been greatly improved. Many new features have been added, such as better client-side spam filtering, better calendaring (including support for Google Calendar), and a much better user interface. If you use xmh or exmh, you’re encouraged to give Evolution a try!

Legacy Features Removed

Some legacy Athena 9 features have been removed from Debathena because they were no longer being used, or because there was a more standard and maintainable way to accomplish the same task. These legacy features are described on a separate page.

Private Workstations

The concept of “private” and “public” workstations has changed drastically in Debathena. Under Athena 9, a workstation was in “public” configuration when first installed. Changing a workstation to “private” configuration entailed changing settings, setting a new root password, enabling some services such as remote login, and creating local storage. Because Debathena is installed on top of an existing Ubuntu or Debian installation, it defaults to a “private” configuration and retains the root password (if any) from the underlying installation, along with any services you may have configured, and directories for local storage.

By default, when using debathena-standard, a user requires a local account in order to log in. For debathena-login, debathena-login-graphical, and debathena-workstation, anyone with an Athena account can log in at the console, but only users with local accounts can log in remotely by default.