AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot

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."

No,

No, it's just you.

Re:No,

I'm still waiting to get my IBM mainframe desktop, I'm hoping I can get a port of Wine for it so I can run WoW on it.

Re:No,

That reminds me, does anyone have a copy of Ubuntu on UNISERVO tape for my UNIVAC?

Re:No,

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.

Re:No,

I have over the years with a number of Germans worked, and he the rules of Germglish appears not to follow.

Oblig. lame joke

Q: What happens when AIX is downsized?

A: It gets the AX!

Haw haw, thank you, I'll be here all week!

Re:Oblig. lame joke

The joke around the place I used to work was that the little smit icon represented the salesguy running away with our money.

2009: Year of AIX on the desktop

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

I'm sure that the submitter and the other five people who really want AIX on the desktop will be sorely disappointed for years to come.

Another victim of Linux...

Early on, it was said that Linux would kill more Unixs than Windows ever would.

It's not just you

A few years back we had a surplus budget, and I was able to convince management that an AIX desktop box was a good investment - for testing & administration both. It has proven to be that and more. We got one of the 285's, and I get use out of it daily.

From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.

- Tony

Re:It's not just you

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.

It's your fault

Maybe theirs.

"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.

A Huge Blow

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.

It's a true desaster.

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.

Not a huge surprise.

It is a pity, in emotional terms, to see interesting and unusual hardware being retired; but it really isn't a surprise, nor is there much to be done about it. Because of overwhelming economies of scale, generic x86 gear is an extraordinarily good deal in price/performance terms. In very low end(cell phones, PDAs, etc.) this doesn't hold and in some high performance or high reliability scenarios(mainframes, exotic supercomputer architectures) it is also not the case; but the desktop is, hands down, x86's area of strength. Now that multiple 64 bit processors are available in even $300 word processing boxes, and dual quad cores with 32gigs of RAM are fairly cheaply available, any task that is out of reach of commodity x86 gear isn't going to be happening on the desktop anyway.

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.

AIX is an antique

Seriously. The toolset sucks. None of the major FOSS projects even know or care if their projects will build on AIX anymore, including (most importantly for me) the CPAN (CPAN testers haven't tested CPAN builds on AIX for years as far as I can tell). The command line utilities have feature sets from like 1976, so you have to install a bunch of GNU packages if you want to get anything done. The best part, IBM will happily sell you a pile of AIX hardware and promise you that the millions of bucks you're getting ready to spend for software to run on it will be well-spent, then you'll find out that half the stuff has never been tested in the real world. Fact is, in the time I spent working on (struggling with?) AIX recently I saw little evidence that IBM is putting any resources into AIX.

I recommend Xming instead of Exceed for X

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

Speaking as 33% of the user base...

I am outraged!

(Better be careful--I might take my ball and head back to VMS...)

Re:Don't be silly

Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?

Somebody without central heat?

Re:Don't be silly

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. ;)

Re:"Smit Happens"

If there is any system you don't hate, it is because you don't know it well enough.

Re:Somehow this remembers me 1995

RISC still is the future. Or haven't you noticed how ARM is outselling all other CPU architectures combined?

Re:Somehow this remembers me 1995

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.

Re:Go ahead and suck it up.

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.