About four years ago MIT stopped purchasing and renewing desktop Sun Solaris Athena systems, both in public student Athena clusters and as workstations provided to the DLCs as part of the Athena program. This decision was driven by a variety of reasons:
As the four year life cycle comes to a close, IS&T wants to remind you that this summer marks the end of life for the few remaining Sun Solaris Athena systems in the public student cluster environment as well as those Sun Solaris Athena systems deployed to departments, labs, and centers as part of the Athena program. |
We are aware of three third-party academic software packages that do not run on Linux:
These three applications have been supplanted by the much more recent ArcGIS suite on Windows. ESRI (the vendor) has not supported ArcView or ArcExplorer on Unix platforms for some time now.
ArcGIS software is available to students on Windows computers maintained by IS&T and OEIT, as well as in DUSP's WIN.MIT.EDU cluster in 37-312 and departmental labs. ArcGIS is also available for installation on students' personal Windows computers (or via VMware in a virtual environment on their Macs). Additionally, the GIS lab in Rotch Library has ArcGIS workstations, along with many datasets and shapefiles for use with the software. ArcGIS is also available in MIT's Citrix environment.
FrameMaker has been steadily declining in popularity in favor of more full-featured open office suites like OpenOffice, which are available on Linux Athena. OpenOffice is also available for personal use on student machines. For document conversion, the Athena Solaris dialups (athena.dialup.mit.edu) will continue to be available for a period of time after Sun Solaris Athena machines disappear from the public student clusters, but we encourage you to convert your FrameMaker documents to a more portable format as soon as possible. More information about converting FrameMaker documents can be found at http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/8h9B.
For users who still require FrameMaker, it is published for the Windows platform only and may be available at a discount through MIT's Adobe discount program: http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/EjJB
Used for generating PDF documents from PostScript, Acrobat Distiller is not available for Linux and has not been supported by Adobe for some time. OpenOffice users can easily generate PDF documents using the PDF output tools built into OpenOffice. LaTeX users may want to consider pdftex, which generates PDF files from LaTeX source. For all other PostScript to PDF conversions, consider using ps2pdf, which is part of the Athena release on Linux platforms. Many other open source applications now also support direct-to-PDF output without needing a third-party application.
Acrobat Professional, the successor to Acrobat Distiller, is available for the Macintosh and Windows platforms and may be purchased through MIT's volume licensing program. For more information, see http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/FTJB.
Students are also eligible to purchase Acrobat Professional at a discount. For more information on the discount program, go to http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/EjJB.
If you have any concerns, questions, or are aware of potential issues related to the end of life of Sun Solaris Athena systems in the Athena environment, please contact Oliver Thomas at othomas@mit.edu or 617-253-9682. Depending on the nature of your concern or problem, IS&T may be able to offer additional migration advice, assistance, or mitigating solutions.
Sincerely,
Oliver
–
Oliver Thomas
Manager of the
Faculty and Student Experience
Information Services & Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
othomas@mit.edu
+1 617 253 9682