With the preliminaries of logging into Athena taken care of, we can move on to Zephyr itself.
Note: if you are unsure of how to log into Athena, refer back to part one for an introduction.
Zephyr
Zephyr is Athena’s messaging system. Conventional wisdom says that Zephyr is difficult to explain – it’s better experienced, but for now all you need to know is that it’s a feature-rich instant messaging system used at MIT.
The most basic way to use Zephyr is to not send messages at all. When you log in to an Athena terminal, you’ll see any messages sent to you automatically in a box, but that’s barely scraping the surface of what Zephyr can do. Another option is using the “zwrite” and other commands where you log in using Linerva, but this is awkward. Instead, I’ll cover a program named Barnowl, which handles (virtually) all of Zephyr’s features and can update in real time, making it useful for instant messaging.
Barnowl
Barnowl is a student-developed zephyr client derived from the antiquated Owl client. It handles most all of Zephyr’s functions and keeps everything centralized.
To start Barnowl, type the command “barnowl” at the Athena command line (see part one for using Linerva). If you’ve never set up Barnowl before, you’ll receive an error message. You’ll need to install Barnowl first.
This is easy to accomplish, simply type “add barnowl”. However, you’ll want Barnowl to be installed every time you start a new Athena session, so we’ll create an environment file, which will run every time you log in. Using nano, as in part 1, create a file named “.bash_environment” (starting with a period – this is common for system files) in your main Athena directory. In it, type “add barnowl”. The commands in this file will be executed every time you log in.
So now, either log out and back in to run .bash_environment or type “add barnowl” and proceed. From here, you can start Barnowl using its command, “barnowl”. You’ll see Barnowl’s welcome screen. From here, there are oodles of things you could do, but let’s start at the basics.
To receive messages in Zephyr, you must subscribe to “classes” where discussion is taking place. These classes can be anything, from clubs, to the wide-ranging “help,” to personal classes. Within classes, there are instances, where lines of discussion can remain grouped together. To start off, you’ll want to subscribe to chat for your class.
To enter a command, first open the Barnowl command prompt by typing a colon (“:”, using Shift). Then, you may type your instructions. Use the “subscribe” command in the form “subscribe [class] [instance] [recipient]“. So, if you were Matt McGann and wanted to subscribe to any messages in the Class of ’00 class, you would type “subscribe 2000 * *”. An asterisk acts as a wildcard, so it matches any instance and any recipient.
Once you’re subscribed to your class’s class, you may see messages appearing on the screen if there’s an active discussion. To write to the class, type “:zwrite -c CLASSNAME”, where “CLASSNAME” is the class you are writing to. A writing area will appear, where you can type your message. To send it, enter a line containing only a period and press enter. Alternatively, press Ctrl+D. In a discussion, you can scroll up and down through comments using the arrow keys and simply press ‘r’ to reply to a message, saving the hassle of the zwrite command.
There are many other classes you can subscribe to. A popular one is “help”, where questions are posed ranging over all topics. The “message” class has several instances which you might find interesting. Additionally, the class named after each Athena user is considered reserved by social custom for whatever the user wants to use it for. You should subscribe to your personal class, and it’s typical for friends to subscribe to each others classes (note: subscription is a bit more personal than Facebook friendships – it’s a bit creepy to subscribe to someone who you’ve never met or talked with). Personal classes are often used for Twitter-like microblogging, including associated discussion.
This brings me to an important point. Zephyr is different from many instant messaging systems like AIM in several ways. First, exemplified by the period method for sending a message, Zephyr tends to be a more thoughtful messaging system than most. Messages are usually short paragraphs, or at least full sentences, utilizing capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar. You will be looked down upon if you speak like a preteen girl in a text message. Note, however, that the prefrosh class is currently linked directly to AIM, so it has a distinctly “chat room” atmosphere, but if you venture outside of this class, be mindful of the expectations of Zephyr messaging.
There’s tons more to write about concerning Zephyr, but this is should get you started. I’ll write at least one more part, which will explain how to use GNU Screen to stay logged in to Barnowl perpetually, as is typical and extremely useful. This part, however, is still in a rough draft stage. There are undoubtedly many corrections and additions that should be made. Direct any questions to namu at mit dot edu.
If you want to dig further into some of Zephyr’s and Barnowl’s features, these are good places to start:
An excellent introductory guide to Zephyr, by SIPB
A much more comprehensive guide, also by SIPB
A getting started guide for Barnowl