Athene is a combination of a custom Linux From Scratch-derived operating system using the 2.6.7 kernel, SciTech SNAP Graphics drivers, and the Athene Desktop featuring the Pandora graphics toolkit. It was designed from the ground up to be a fast yet graphic-intensive desktop operating system that would appeal to a wide range of users.

On first inspection it's simply amazing. The graphics are visually impressive and there are none of the usual problems associated with an X server, such as tearing, flicker, bad geometry, and slow redraws. You click a button in a window or dialogue and the resulting action is instantaneous. I suspect this has more to do with the superior 2D graphics engine than anything else -- in other words, you're seeing the screen redraw faster than you're used to in Windows, Mac OS X, or an X11-based desktop, and that makes the whole operating system seem like it's supercharged. From a certain frame of reference, rendering 2D graphics in the desktop environment does make Athene faster than other GNU/Linux-based operating systems, even if all other things are equal. You "feel" desktop speed based on how quickly you see the intended result that your actions have initiated, so the degree of power that the hardware has is irrelevant if your operating system can display graphics quickly enough.

I benchmarked the performance capabilities of SciTech's SNAP Graphics driver framework for GNU/Linux last year and found it to be not only faster in 2D rendering performance, but also far easier to install, maintain, and adjust than other proprietary drivers. SNAP Graphics allows you to switch video cards between reboots without having to change your configuration; it adjusts the geometry, resolution, and color depth for you automatically based on the card's abilities. I didn't benchmark Athene, but I believe Rocklyte when it says that it's at least 25% faster than X11 in some ways. Even when running X11 programs in Athene, the graphics should be significantly faster.

3D rendering is and probably always will be controlled by a kernel driver, and proprietary kernel drivers for video cards have not been bundled with Athene. That means that although the 2D performance is exceptional, hardware 3D rendering is not possible in this edition of Athene. It's difficult to say if simply adding the kernel module would add 3D support; most programs that use hardware rendering also require X11-based technologies like GLX and DRI, which would in turn have to be downloaded, compiled, and installed.

A desktop of a different color

The entire Athene operating system was designed with an object-oriented approach; every icon, file, window, and program is an object in the system. Rocklyte claims that this eases data management between programs and simplifies network communication. Athene does not use an X server to run graphical programs, thus reducing some of the usual network overhead of a GNU/Linux system.

Instead of using a threading model to implement a multitasked environment as most Unix-like systems do, Athene uses a process called micro-tasking, which breaks up individual programs into protected multiple tasks. Not only does this increase speed and efficiency, but it also increases stability and security.

The Indigo desktop is attractive and offers a large desktop space. Right-clicking on the desktop brings up a Fluxbox-like program menu, which could not be shown in a screenshot

Instead of traditional window managers, Athene comes with three choices of desktop style: Wintel, which is more or less self-explanatory; Omega Workbench, which is meant to look and feel like AmigaOS; and Indigo, which offers an enormous scrollable desktop area and a basic on-screen menu. Of all of them I preferred Indigo, but I can't decide whether it was because I loved the color scheme and desktop layout or because I was sick of the Wintel look and didn't really care for the way the Omega Workbench functioned. Certainly this is purely a matter of personal preference. These desktops are all part of the same framework, so you've got the same menu entries and available features on all three desktop styles. Adding a program in one desktop theme adds it to all of them.

The desktop themes are designed using an HTML- and XML-like language called Dynamic Markup Language, or DML for short. It's very easy to understand and modify if you already know HTML, but there are enough major differences and system-specific commands that you have to go through the free tutorials to use it to create anything of substance.

It's not just the themes that use DML -- the whole desktop environment is based on it. The object-oriented approach plus DML equals a totally unique graphical userland that doesn't run application binaries so much as it renders programs based on DML files. In other words, the native text editor and file manager, as well as the whole desktop environment and everything that you hear, see, and use in Athene, is rendered from a fully hackable DML file. It's almost as if your operating system were one big transparent Web browser. The only departure from this is when you install and use X11-based programs; in those instances an X server is started invisibly and the client programs run in it as usual. There is no noticeable difference in the display when running X-based programs; in other words, you could open the native text editor in one window and KEdit in another window and if you didn't know that one runs in X and the other is DML-based, you would not be able to tell one technology from the other.

KDE is advertised as being included as a package, but even after I installed all of the packages in the KDE directory I couldn't figure out how to start it. Rocklyte provides no readme file, no manual entry, nothing -- I suspect that KDE as we know it is not what Rocklyte meant when it said that KDE 3.2.3 was included. All of the programs that come with KDE by default are in the packages directory, however.

Software support

There aren't many programs that are included with the base distribution -- a very simple text editor, picture viewer, audio player, and an interesting file manager. If you want more programs, there are about two dozen Linux binary packages on the CD that offer programs such as Mozilla Firefox, the GIMP, KDE plus KOffice, GFTP, GAIM, OpenOffice.org, MPlayer, and a handful of others.

The package manager itself is oversimplistic and tedious, and it has no dependency resolution capabilities. If you want to install a program, you navigate to the packages directory on the CD, open up the directory that has the category you want, then double-click on the program name. Then you click Next to agree to the license (assuming you do -- most are under the GPL), and Next to install. Wait a few moments for the installation to happen, then click Next again to finish. You have to do this for every program, unless of course you discover that you need GTK or Qt installed before you continue, in which case you have to navigate to the Libraries directory and install the dependency first.

I tried installing Sun StarOffice 7 from a program CD, and was successful -- I even got the Java Runtime Environment installed. The only trouble was that there were no icons or menu entries created for the new applications, so I had to start them from a virtual terminal window. I didn't explore the option of adding menu entries by hand, but I'm sure it can be done as easily as it can in Blackbox/Fluxbox or in GNOME (which is to say, not all that easily, but not a necessarily complex process).

Web browser plug-ins? Forget it -- none are included with Firefox or anywhere on the CD. You can install them as usual through Firefox's built-in plug-in installer, or download and install them separately as usual.

You can also run Athene 2004 completely from the CD, as it is designed to be both a LiveCD and an installation CD. You'll get the same experience either way, but of course everything will be slower if you run it from the CD.

Bugs, problems, and other shortcomings

The only real bug I found in Athene was in the installer utility, which tells you that you must pre-partition your hard drive with Linux partitions. It even goes so far as to tell you what programs you need to run from the command line in order to make that happen. But if you click the Next button and sail through that initial warning, you'll find a graphical partition screen before you. This seems to be more of an error in documentation than a problem with the software.

Speaking of partitions, Athene supports ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, FAT32, and NTFS. Unfortunately the partition utility available during the installation knows how to write only ext2 and ext3 (and swap, of course) partitions. Generally I prefer to have my /home directory as its own partition so that I can overwrite the distribution with another one, or reinstall it, and not lose my personal data and program settings. The installation program would not allow this; you can't assign drive labels or mount points from the partition utility. Instead, Athene uses the first available ext2 or ext3 partition on your hard drive and mounts the rest as directories in /mnt. You can change this behavior by manually editing /etc/fstab after installation.

Athene installs in less than 10 minutes even on a slow machine. However, it's poorly suited to unusual computers, such as laptop or notebook machines and VIA's Mini-ITX small form factor systems. On my Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop I had a slight corruption in the display, and PCMCIA services were nonexistent. Athene flat out refused to work in any way, shape, or form on a VIA Epia MIII-12000 -- even the LiveCD wouldn't run.

There are no programs for user management, and you can't add new users during the installation procedure; you must add them manually through the command line. There are no power-saving functions, no hardware configuration tools, and there is no way to update the system over a network.

Speaking of networking, Athene does not have any DHCP facilities available by default. That means that it's impossible for most people to connect to the Internet without downloading the source code for dhcpcd and compiling it manually.

Lastly, I had a problem with the license agreement, which is Microsoft-like and prohibits sharing. This is probably a necessity because of SciTech's proprietary drivers; in other words the licensing matters are out of Rocklyte's hands, to a certain degree. The license does allow for modification of the software to an extent, and Rocklyte makes available some 90% of the total codebase. That missing 10% is the really interesting stuff, though, so don't expect to be able to hack some of the more unique parts of the Athene operating environment.

Conclusions

Right now Athene 2004 doesn't offer much in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, and you can't be immediately productive with it, making it unsuitable for anyone except those willing to explore and tinker with it. If that's your goal, U.S. $110 would seem an excessive fee for a year's worth of updates on CD. If you just want one CD, the cost is U.S. $47.95 -- that's a bit more palatable. If you wanted to use your existing operating system -- GNU/Linux or Windows -- as a base, you can buy just the Athene Desktop for $29.95, which is only the GUI and its native programs as discussed here.

Athene needs a significant overhaul of its existing utilities. It would greatly benefit from some added utilities for user management, online updating, hardware configuration and control, power management, and networking. These are the kinds of graphical utilities that users have come to expect from a graphically-driven operating system. It makes no sense to spend so much time and energy making a graphical desktop as unique and powerful as Athene, yet force administrators to use the command line interface for all management and configuration tasks. I'd also like to see a customized interactive development environment for programming in DML -- something specific to Athene, made for modifying the operating system and designing new programs in it.

It's impossible to deny the degree of technical advancement in the Athene operating system, and in fact I'd say it's the most technologically innovative OS that I've ever used. But besides learning to program and modify it as a hobby, I'm not sure what you'd do with it at this point. And it's unclear whether Rocklyte can stay alive long enough and garner enough industry support and attention to succeed. There have been many innovative operating systems in the past -- BeOS and NeXTStep come to mind -- that have failed not because they weren't good, but because they just didn't have the money and manpower to penetrate the market significantly.