Solaris Athena End-of-Life (EOL) letter

Solaris Athena is reaching its end-of-life

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:

• Linux Athena workstations increasingly deliver superior performance at a much lower cost
• Vendors increasingly target Linux as their primary Unix-based desktop platform for both commercial and open source third-party software and support
• The high cost of developing a custom Solaris distribution with diminishing resources was rapidly becoming prohibitive
• Declining popularity and lack of industry/higher education adoption of Sun Solaris as a desktop operating environment
• Standardizing on a single, Linux-based Athena desktop platform allows MIT to leverage community efforts in software packaging, user interface development, and hardware integration
• The ability to deploy, maintain, and support more machines in our student computing environment with reduced resources

Timeline

• Summer 2005: Initial communications about "Solaris sunset" and IS&T stops renewing Sun Solaris Athena workstations except by special request (Is this really true?)
• Summer 2006, 2007, 2008: Renewals of DLC and public student cluster workstations replace Sun Solaris Athena machines with Athena Linux systems
• Summer 2008: Analysis of Solaris-only 3rd-party software packages and possible alternatives
• Spring 2009: Remaining Sun Solaris workstations come up for renewal
• Summer 2009: Remaining Sun Solaris workstations in public student clusters and most DLC Sun Solaris Athena systems are replaced with Athena Linux systems
• Fall 2009: Remaining DLC Sun Solaris Athena systems replaced with Linux Athena systems
• IAP 2010: Athena Sun Solaris dialup systems (athena.dialup.mit.edu, x.dialup.mit.edu) are replaced
• IAP 2010: Sun Solaris Athena systems in 37-318 ("holdout cluster") replaced with Linux Athena systems

Alternatives

Solaris software packages

We are aware of three 3rd-party academic software packages which do not run on Linux:

1. ArcInfo (GIS)
2. FrameMaker
3. Acrobat Distiller

1. ArcInfo, ArcView, and ArcExplorer (GIS)

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.

2. FrameMaker

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://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/EjJB

3. Acrobat Distiller

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://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/FTJB.

Students are also eligible to purchase Acrobat Professional at a discount. For more information on the discount program, please see: http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/EjJB

Risks

• Unknown course/class dependencies on Solaris by local locker software in course lockers
• Unknown dependencies on Solaris by local locker software and departmentally developed applications used by students
• Familiarity with Solaris as an operating environment, requiring learning a new environment to switch to Ubuntu-based Linux Athena
• Personal preference for Sun Solaris or Sun hardware

Help and support

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
Blah blah blah
Faculty and Student Experience
Athena something something
Information Services & Technology