Slashdot Log In
AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Nov 18, 2008 11:56 AM
from the caravan-moving-on dept.
from the caravan-moving-on dept.
flnca writes "Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them, and I was surprised to see that IBM is going to give its IntelliStation POWER Series workstations the boot in January '09. A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs? IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). Some years ago, I enjoyed hacking away on an RS/6000 workstation running AIX 4.2, and it was a pure joy. Not only the kernel, but also the admin tools, like smit and smitty. Their blade-centric solution uses Windows as a client for workstation application. This truly sounds like IBM wants AIX only for servers anymore. I'm not amused. Although, eXceed on Windows with an XDCMP server running on AIX might also be a viable solution ... whatever. But it can't beat a native POWER box sitting on your desk, that's for sure."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
No, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No, (Score:5, Informative)
It was submitted by someone in Germany (so English is most likely a second or third language). It was edited by... well it wasn't edited.
Parent
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Oblig. lame joke (Score:5, Funny)
A: It gets the AX!
Haw haw, thank you, I'll be here all week!
Re:Oblig. lame joke (Score:5, Funny)
The joke around the place I used to work was that the little smit icon represented the salesguy running away with our money.
Parent
Insert Evil Laugh Here (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps your front page /. post leading to their product pages will screw with the marketing department stats, thus forcing them to reconsider.
Be honest, was this your plan all along?
2009: Year of AIX on the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how is this a story? I used AIX back in the 90s and it was okay. What do I use AIX for today? Back-end processing when I can't get a Linux box past the procurement guys.
Do I code on AIX? Nope I code on Mac OSX or Linux.
Do I manage on AIX? Nope the management stuff lives on Linux and Windows.
A story would be IBM pushing AIX on the desktop. But this is just sensible and if you really want an AIX desktop then its an X environment so just run a server and use an old box as an X Terminal.
Personally I've been looking at getting a server as my next box and concentrating on networking, monitor et al on an XTerm running a stripped down Linux. What is this 1995 to say you have to have a box running under your desk?
Re:2009: Year of AIX on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:2009: Year of AIX on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, how is this a comment? I've always wondered why people waste time commenting about how a story was not worth posting, let alone reading, but apparently these devoid-of-interest stories are still worth commenting on.
Parent
Re:2009: Year of AIX on the desktop (Score:4, Funny)
I was going to make some quip about you being new here, and then I noticed that I'm AC, and older than your user...so I will: you must be new here.
Parent
Don't be silly (Score:4, Funny)
Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Re:Don't be silly (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Somebody without central heat?
Parent
Re:Don't be silly (Score:5, Informative)
Except that the 5 GHz CPU is a POWER 5 processor (if I am right), that beats the living shit out of AMD or intel, when it comes to computational power per clock cycle. ;)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The "tool" has experience in assembler (Score:5, Informative)
It was a hardware limitation, you ignorant tool.
Sorry to disappoint you : I'm not a tool.
In fact, I happen to have quite some experience programming assembler for x86.
There's no such thing as a 640Ko hardware limitation. That number is completely arbitrary. Pulled out of Bill Gates' ass.
The 8088 and 8086 chip have 20 address lines. Meaning : 2^20 addressable byte or 1 MiB memory limit. The limit is there at 1 MiB.
When designing the memory layout, they had to reserve some address range to be used for stuff other than memory (BIOS, address range used by hardware, etc.)
You have a couple of actual limits imposed by the 8088/8086 chips :
- Memory is up to 1MiB
- As small portion at the begin of the memory is used for the interrupt table.
- The last bytes before the 1MiB are where the processor starts when turned on and contain instruction to jump to the BIOS it self.
These are the only fixed addresses
The split between physical memory and mapped address space could be placed anywhere.
640k was just chosen because :
- it's ten time the 64k addressable by previous machines
- it's the first segment beginning with a letter in hexadecimal. memory is in segments 0000 to 9000, reserved are in segments A000 (color graphics) to F000 (BIOS)
If the addresses hadn't been fixed in advance and/or the reserved space had been place in the begin of the address space like on most home microcomputers, the address space left for memory would have been continuous. Yielding to more free addresse for more "main memory" (the upper 384 are a huge waste of space - as proof see all the TSR programs that existed to try to "loadhi" and cram more software in that "UMB" memory range). A continuous memory scheme would probably have helped a more easy transition scheme to processors with bigger address space.
Parent
My guess. (Score:3, Interesting)
The new I7 and maybe the new 45 nm AMD cpus are probably a better solution for a workstation then a Power these days. Linux has more hardware and software support than AIX so IBM probably sees the future as an I7 running Linux.
Another victim of Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Early on, it was said that Linux would kill more Unixs than Windows ever would.
Re:Another victim of Linux... (Score:4, Interesting)
Newer versions of *nix are killing older versions of *nix.
The exact opposite of what's happening with Windows.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's not just you (Score:5, Informative)
From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.
- Tony
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Forgive me, because I'm a linux guy (that's all I've ever used and known), and because of that, I don't know what the benefits of having an AIX machine on the desktop would be.
I understand that on certain large hardware, AIX is preferable due to hardware or other requirements, but what is the draw on the desktop? Is there superior software, or stability? Management tools?
I manage Linux servers, and I have linux on my desktop because it seems effortless to me now, but I can't imagine that if I had one of th
Re:It's not just you (Score:5, Informative)
I used to be an AIX administrator.
There's not a lot of benefit to having an AIX box on your desk (though I did), other than it being the same as the systems you're administering.
(The following is my personal opinion - fanboys of other operating systems need not respond; I'm sure your OS of choice is just peachy too)
Yes, AIX is more stable and I prefer the management tools and interfaces to other Unix-like operating systems. As such, having it on my desktop was preferable to a Linux system because I was more familiar with the tools and they were the same as the machines I was administering all day long.
If I was running Linux systems for a living, I'd have a Linux box on my desk for the same reasons.
There are some advantages to writing/testing your code/scripts/etc on your local machine before pushing it out to a development/production system. While in theory ksh/bash/csh/etc should be the same on every system, we all know there are quirks to the implementations that cause issues.
So yes, there are some benefits to AIX on the desktop as an administrator.
Finally, there are some shops (a few military contractors I'm familiar with) that use AIX on the desktop for their engineers because the specialized applications they use only support AIX - usually graphic design hooked into large AIX systems on the backend for modeling/redering cycles.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The desktop was under $10k, sits at my desk, and is mine to do what I want with it. Currently I'm testing AIX 6.1 (works great, cool new features). It'll run KDE and an ancient version of firefox, if I want, usually I just have X with m
It's your fault (Score:5, Insightful)
"I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them..."
So you haven't bought one because it's not affordable. Yeah, I have no idea why it makes business sense for them to cut that line. I guess keeping them around to amuse you wasn't enough. Either their hardware is too expensive or their users too poor.
One things for sure - there was no profit there.
Breaking news! (Score:3, Funny)
Just in! "Geek wonders why product X that he loves to hack but is only used by 0.0000001% of the market is going the way of the dodo". Film at 11!
Hey, for example, I wanted Baldur's Gate 3 too :( (yes, I know that Stardock's founder wants to renew some old franchises).
Go ahead and suck it up. (Score:3, Informative)
AIX is horrendous. I mean, truly horrible.
Smitty - though it has its uses - is the nastiest piece of manure ever to disgrace an SSH window. Everything even remotely UNXy IBM makes is, IMHO, totally over-priced.
AIX hardware is over-priced, under-powered and totally uninteresting. I have machines running Linux on Opteron right here and they simply out-perform AIX machines (including a 12 CPU Power6 P570 AIX 5.3) at least 10 times.
And don't get me started on the stability of AIX vs Linux or BSD, please. I have software here that can make any AIX machine cry and call for mommy, when most Linux distributions just suck it up and carry on.
AIX machines are essentially dull ultra-expensive big iron. Most programmers I work with would rather have a small machine with Red Hat and tons of GNU goodness on it than a huge AIX beast.
And just in case you are wondering: yes, I do administer UNIX machines for a living. Just check my Slashdot journal, and you'll get a ton of information on AIX, Solaris and so on and so forth.
This being said, I'll take AIX over Windows any day. And either Slackware or OpenBSD over everything else.
Re:Go ahead and suck it up. (Score:5, Insightful)
AIX is even worse if you do any system programming it. Around here, AIX is pronounced "aches" for a very good reason. We also have a saying "AIX is always different". Anything difficult you want to do on Unix, you need to code up a special AIX-specific version. It's Always Different.
And not different-better, different-holy-crap-this-API-was-designed-by-crack-addled-clowns.
Parent
Re:Go ahead and suck it up. (Score:5, Funny)
I have an AIX story. Try out this program:
#include
void main(bla bla)
{
int x, y, z;
x = 1;
y = 0;
z = x / y;
printf("%d\n",z);
}
On most versions of unix, this produces a floating point exception. (which is correct) The error you're supposed to get is a clue to explaining why AIX gives you the answer it gives: 15.
brian
Parent
"Smit Happens" (Score:4, Funny)
You are joking, you LIKED smit??!? We used to have bumper stickers that said "Smit Happens" on our doors where I worked a decade ago....the IBM guys REALLY hated those.
Re:"Smit Happens" (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is any system you don't hate, it is because you don't know it well enough.
Parent
Somehow this remembers me 1995 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Somehow this remembers me 1995 (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Somehow this remembers me 1995 (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm, and here I thought that old-school 8-bit computing is the future, since more than half of all CPUs sold are 8-bit processors.
Parent
The march towards Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Over time, all the cool features from proprietary UNIX versions are getting ported to Linux, either directly or by being re-implemented. As Linux becomes more and more acceptable as a replacement, expect to see proprietary UNIX versions start to go away.
If IBM hires a person to work on Linux, that work helps IBM across pretty much their whole product line. If IBM hires a person to work on AIX, that work has much less value now, and will have even less and less value over time as Linux gathers up more of the market. Also, as Linux keeps getting better, it would take more and more work to add similar features to AIX, to try to keep up. Eventually, IBM is going to stop paying for work on AIX at all; they will end-of-life AIX, and just sell Linux.
I don't know for sure about SMIT but Linux does have LVM and various tools to manage it. AIX gurus, how ready is Linux to replace AIX now?
And, are desktop POWER machines going to be available with Linux?
steveha
Re:The march towards Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
AIX still has significant advantages over Linux for us. A lot (all?) of the stuff that is new in AIX has come from the AS/400 390 mainframe stuff, and the hardware for AIX line is now the same as that for the AS/400 line (or whatever they're all called this week).
For our business, AIX is still rock solid, has excellent support (as you'd expect for the cost) and can dynamically switch resources between virtual systems. The CPU allocation is wonderful. It can automatically assign spare CPU to any system that needs it, giving preference to production systems.
The virtual networking and hardware self-monitoring is also far superior to what little I've seen in the Windows area.
While I can't comment on other systems, AIX has given us a lot of flexibility and reliability that the Intel team here (mostly Windows) don't get in their virtual server environment.
Of course all this is changing, and the smaller systems are getting the bigger system stuff.
So the real question is not "how ready is Linux to AIX?" but rather "can Linux do what I want now?" because all the mainframe technology is filtering down to be accessible to consumer grade stuff.
Parent
Warehousing Costs (Score:4, Informative)
Warehousing costs are an indicator not a base cause. If you have 1000 units sitting in a warehouse for six months depreciating, it's because no one's buying them. Which means you're losing money from a failed projection. Something this seemingly slow moving would likely need a different supply chain, say direct from manufacture, JIT. Also, the margins on such might just not be there. Hardly worth the effort since IBM is not a non-profit.
A Huge Blow (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a huge blow to scientific and engineering computing. I know of thousands of POWER based Intellistations at several aerospace companies. CAD and finite element analysis software runs on these boxes, usually CATIA, NASTRAN, and some CFD codes. Engineering modeling and simulation software has been running on AIX for a while. Only now are Windows boxes near the performance that engineers need. The only good that might come of this is that hopefully the surplus market will be flooded with POWER based Intellistations and AIX CDs.
Re:A Huge Blow (Score:4, Informative)
Where have I been the past decade? In some of the most influential aerospace and aircraft design firms in the world, actually.
Yes, the video performance of the Quadros is undeniably fantastic. I even use retired Quadros in my home machines. Not every engineer needs a POWER based machine, of course. Many engineers could do just fine with a Windows box. But, serious CATIA work, meshing, and analysis were impossible to do on Windows machines; they simply couldn't touch the AIX boxes when you needed to run something that would require more than 3GB of RAM. Right now, Cessna Aircraft is still using POWER based machines for a very large portion of their CATIA work, although they were starting to transition to Windows boxes. Everyone there who supports CATIA and ENOVIA has a POWER workstation.
Now that Windows and the x86 CPU family has gotten with the program, they have barged their way into the engineering computing world. Cheap multicore processors and cheap operating system licensing makes the decision today to use Windows PCs a no-brainer. Now that Windows boxes can do what the AIX boxes have been able to do for a long time, the cheaper Windows boxes are finding their use on engineering desktops, and software developers are writing for Windows. But the point is that this is a very recent development. As of 2005, it was *impossible* for me to do the work I needed to do on a Windows box; the technology (hardware and software) *did not exist.* Price/performance is irrelevant if performance is zero; if a box can't do the work you need it to do, it doesn't matter that it was cheaper than some other box.
Parent
It's a true desaster. (Score:5, Funny)
To elaborate: He's bemoaning that this beautyfull desktop [jfedor.org] is being discontinued. A true catastrophe that will set back the entire industry by years to come.
Re:It's a true desaster. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Not a huge surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
For something like AIX, with its serious UNIX roots, most of the things you would use it for can be done remotely, from just about any client that can handle ssh and maybe NFS. There just isn't all that much point in having costly, exotic hardware sitting on your desk. Now, I'm sure that there are certain exceptions; but it is very hard to sustain a product on "certain exceptions" in a market with substantial economies of scale.
It is a pity; but neither a new nor an avoidable one, that the technology market, particularly the lower end of it, has very little room for "a bit better and a lot more expensive". If AIX ran on commodity x86 gear, even a certified subset of it, there would probably be room(just look at OpenSolaris); but as long as it depends on POWER on the desktop, it is game over.
Wait? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you saying using smit and smitty was a pure joy?
Bwahahaha!
AIX is an antique (Score:5, Interesting)
Other PowerPC options available (Score:4, Interesting)
YellowDog makes a PowerPC based Linux machine. The latest Linux Journal has a review of it:
http://us.fixstars.com/products/powerstation/ [fixstars.com]
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10263 [linuxjournal.com]
Not perfect, but workable.
I recommend Xming instead of Exceed for X (Score:5, Informative)
If you're just need an X server on Windows to connect to your *nix box, I suggest using Xming [sourceforge.net]. It's free, lightweight, easy to configure, and one can quickly setup shortcuts to connect to a specific server and run a program. It's also very useful for getting around a content filter if you can access your own *nix server from the internet.
I don't have any affiliation with Colin Harrison, however I've used other X servers on Windows before and this has been the best. Here's my experience with different X servers:
Exceed - Bloated, expensive, extra licensing fee for doing X11 over SSH, unstable copy and paste (in the past versions I used)
ReflectionX - A bit bloated, expensive, funky interface
Cygwin* - Too many unneeded apps included for just an X server, FREE, difficult to configure if you're not familiar with it
Xming - Light weight, FREE, quick install, can use PuTTY's plink to do configure free X11 forwarding over SSH, copy and paste works, it just works
*In regards to Cygwin, I understand that it is more than just an X server, however it has been recommended a number of times to me as a solution for a free X server on Windows
AIX on the desktop? (Score:3, Funny)
"I have AIX on my desktop!"
"Oh, I'm sorry honey. I got some aspirin in my top drawer at my desk. Help yourself."
"No, I mean it's AIX."
"You told me already. Take some aspirin and have a cup of coffee. That works for migranes too."
"Arrrrrgh!"
"Poor guy--I should talk to the boss about seeing if he can get some vacation time in soon..."
Speaking as 33% of the user base... (Score:5, Funny)
I am outraged!
(Better be careful--I might take my ball and head back to VMS...)