The Athene Desktop

Athene boots in roughly four to eight seconds, depending on the speed of the machine and what you have installed on it. During this time it will automatically detect the hardware that is plugged into your machine (such as your sound card, CDROM, network card, USB devices, graphics card and others). Athene is plug 'n' play oriented, so it will automatically adjust if you change the hardware in your system. As soon as the boot process is finished, you'll be presented with the login screen as shown here. Besides typing in your name and password, you can also choose a desktop environment if you don't want the default desktop associated with your user login. We'll touch on the available desktops later. Accepting the default will load up Wintel 2000.

The Athene desktop loads almost instantaneously after logging in. Because Athene is based on a load-on-demand development model, both the desktop and applications will load quickly as they avoid processing unrequired program information when they start. In fact, Athene will spend more time loading and processing your desktop wallpaper background than on configuring itself. Enough said!

On your first installation, Athene has a minimal amount of extra software installed. This is by design - we don't want to presume to overload your system with software that you don't need before you've even started. Clicking on the QikInstall icon will take you through to Athene's standardised installation program. The CDROM comes with a lot of essential software for both users and developers. This includes:

Konqueror & Firefox Web Browsers
GIMP, MPlayer, CDR Tools
GAIM, GFTP, XChat
KDE 3.2.3 with KDE Application Suite
KDE Office 1.3
Open Office 1.1
Games: Barrage, Exodus, LBreakout 2, LTris, Patience, Mahjongg and more.
CUPS Printer Support
The GCC 3.3.3 compiler, plus tools and applications for developers.

Athene's login screen

The Wintel desktop

About 15-20 minutes is all you need to check out the available packages and install the ones that are essential to your work environment. Once you're done, you'll want to configure your system preferences so that the desktop functions the way that you want it to. This is all done through the System Options program, which controls your personal preferences from one area.

The System Options program configures most aspects of your desktop and the interface, as well as audio and program settings. Any configuration changes that you make are applied immediately, so you don't need to restart the desktop after making adjustments. The emphasis here is on ease of use, and the interface is self-documented so that you don't need to resort to help files for information.

Athene also includes a File Manager that is designed purely for managing your file system (without complicating matters with integrated browser functionality). Split into two file views, the process of copying and moving files around the system is much easier without having to cut and paste between locations. Items are single-click to select and you can highlight multiple files without having to hold down the shift key. If you have multiple partitions on your hard drive/s (such as a Windows installation), Athene will detect all of them automatically on boot up and make them available through the File Manager. There is no need to manually configure your hard disk partitions. If you change the partition table or format the partitions with new filesystems, Athene will automatically adjust for this on the next bootup. Athene supports FAT, FAT32, NTFS, JFS, XFS, EXT2, EXT3 and some other popular file systems.

You might be wondering what other software you can install besides that included on the CDROM. We've been able to include applications like the Firefox browser and Open Office on the CDROM thanks to the X11 compatibility server, which allows you to run X11 based software in the Athene desktop. With this in mind you can download almost any existing Linux application and run it in Athene. Popular download sites like freshmeat.net are ideal for sourcing new software and our download area contains popular software packages for our supported platforms.

Once you've installed all the software that you need and have configured the system to your liking, it might look like one of these screenshots.

NEXT: Choose Your Desktop Interface

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