For those who don’t know, I have a computer server in my room (basically a computer that’s connected to the internet that sits around for a while and waits for requests) called electron-monkey! It’s an old Dell Optiplex GX50 1.1 GHz Celeron processor. Here are some pictures of my good old buddy:

The computer, under my desk:

My keboard:

You may ask, why do I call this computer electron-monkey? To be honest, I’m not really sure myself! It sounded like a good idea at the time… and computers do sort of “juggle” electrons… sort of…

I had previously been using electron-monkey as a webserver, so if you went to http://electron-monkey.mit.edu, you’d get the website that’s on my computer. It wasn’t running Windows; instead it was running a distribution of Linux known as Ubuntu that’s quite popular and known for it’s user-friendly-ness.

I was certainly very happy with my Ubuntu system, but being the daring and fearless adventurer that I am, I decided to try and install Athena on electron-monkey . Athena is the computer operating system developed here at MIT, and it’s what all of the computer clusters around campus run. It’s pretty useful for doing a lot of things, such as talking to other people across campus, using the internet and checking email, and running cool Athena-only software. I really like Athena, so I figured I’d install the Athena linux variant on electron-monkey.

Searching through some documentation online, I found that there’s actually an Athena install image available from the MIT website. So, I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD, and ran it on electron-monkey to install Athena. And the best part is, it worked!! Here are some pictures of my new friend, running our favorite operating system:

The IS&T Athena screen saver

The Athena login screen. Note that it automagically detected that my computer was electron-monkey.mit.edu!

Myself logged into Athena:

So, this made my day! This means that, while in Next House, I’ll theoretically never have to go to the Athena cluster again, because I can just use the personal machine in my room… unless I have to print something…

I’m still figuring out a lot of stuff about how Athena works, so right now my website (http://electron-monkey.mit.edu) isn’t functioning. There’s still quite a bit of tweaking to do, but I’m very happy that I have a personal Athena workstation!