As you may remember from past hardware renewal and Athena reqeust-for-proposal letters, as of about four years ago MIT has stopped purchasing and renewing desktop Sun Solaris Athena systems, both in our public student Athena clusters and as workstations provided to the DLCs. This decision was driven by a variety of reasons, which can be summarized as:
With year four since this change coming to a close, we want to remind you that this summer marks the end-of-life for the few remaining Sun Solaris Athena systems in our public student cluster environment as well as those Sun Solaris Athena systems deployed to departments, labs, and centers. |
We are aware of three 3rd-party academic software packages which 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 IS&T, OEIT, and DUSP WIN.MIT.EDU Windows computers 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 Star*Office and OpenOffice, both of 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 here: 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://itinfo.mit.edu/article.php?id=7516
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.
Acrobat Professional, the successor to Acrobat Distiller, is available for the Mac and Windows platforms and may be purchased through MIT's volume licensing program. For more information, please see: http://itinfo.mit.edu/article.php?id=8620. Students are also eligible to purchase Acrobat Professional at a discount. For more information on the discount program, please see http://itinfo.mit.edu/article.php?id=7516
If you have any concerns, questions, or aware 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 we may be able to offer additional migration advice, assistance, or mitigating solutions.
Sincerely,
Oliver Thomas
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Faculty and Student Experience
Athena something something?
Information Services & Technology