AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot 366
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, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
IBM Mainframe Desktop (Score:2)
It's been done [wikipedia.org]. Back in '83.
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.
Re:No, (Score:5, Funny)
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[...] and he appears the rules of Germglish not to follow.
FTFY. --Your Friendly Neighbourhood Germglish Grammar Nazi
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A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs?
The first sentence is incomplete, and the second one is a run on. I didn't even notice it until you asked because the construction is not unusual at all, even though it is technically wrong. There's a couple of these in your summary, but I wouldn't have immediately pegged you for a non-native English writer since most of us write like that anyways in informal postings.
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I think English is one of the few languages out there that specifies the subject in all sentences.
It is raining.
What is raining? What is it?
In Spanish, at least, it comes out as Is Raining. I think it's similar in Russian.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A more clear example to illustrate this would be "He is talking" would directly translate into "Esta hablando".
"Esta" being the verb "estar" (to be) conjugated with the third person pronoun "el" (he). That's why the construction "el esta hablando" is redundant, the "el" is only needed for emphasis, which would be something like: He, he is talking... but "esta hablando" would translate to: "he is talking", and not: "is talking", even thought
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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)
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Was it simply that the AIX box was a multiproc power system?
No, it was the system architecture of the RS/6000 and the clarity of AIX that I enjoyed. It was like "playing with the real toys". At that time, Linux for instance, wasn't half as far as it is now.
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I do like smit, but seriously, when is a multi-ten-thousand dollar AIX server better than a comparable Linux or BSD box?
Smit is nice but Linux has good admin tools too. Oh man, and compiling open source source software on AIX is way more trouble than it should be (at least on 5.2). I couldn't even find a completely functional version of GCC as a binary. There's no package management, either. I really can't see what the point is nowadays.
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.
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.
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Step aside, son. I'll handle this.
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)
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Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Who on earth would need 640k of memory! Or wait...did I just "whoooooosh" myself?
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.
Re:Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Somebody without central heat?
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Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
So how do you heat YOUR desktop?
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Me, because I don't want an applet that shows me the weather today in a teeny tiny window, I want to simulate today's highs and lows right here, on my desktop!
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. ;)
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Advice (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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That's the point really. IBM only makes 2 Power 6 processors, fast and really fast. At a desktop price, they really don't want to sell these anymore. Like you said, they'd rather have you buying LPARs or Blades at better markup if you want to do programming or testing. They've also pulled a lot of the hardware OS locks out with AIX 6.1 and i5/OS 6.1 so they REALLY don't want people figuring out they could run i on this thing and not buying expensive servers.
They made that? (Score:2)
Very informative summary, considering I was unaware IBM even offered AIX on the desktop. That alone should tell you how much they cared about it.
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Many years ago, I could swear I saw IBM (x86) branded PCs in a datacenter that were running AIX. I was handling Novell and Sun systems back then, but I was intensely curious about those machines and what they were doing. They were in the same chassis as my Netware systems, and looked completely different from the RS/6000s.
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AIX was available on x86. Years ago (around 1991?) IBM gave my company an AIX package for PS/2 hardware. Gobs of diskettes, pounds of printed docs. It seemed clunky and we never did much with it, but it was there. Of course the PS/2 Model 80 (i386) it was installed on was a slothful piece of crap.
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).
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It was called Neverwinter Nights.
Seriously, you wanted a direct sequel? Following on from the end of Throne of Bhaal? What would you do? Depending on how you ended the game you're at least an ubercharacter of ridiculously high level, and you're quite possibly the god of murder. You killed Demogorgon as a side quest. Where do you go from here?
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Conquering the world :D
Seriously, I'm sure they would come up with something. And I would be okay with BG3 not following BG2 in terms of story. NWN was nice but it wasn't really a sequel IMO. Little actual roleplaying, and the main campaign was short and kinda weak. Personal opinion anyway.
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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!
worse, he only fondly remembers hacking it several years ago...
Really? (Score:2)
Target market (Score:2)
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.
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And not different-better, different-holy-crap-this-API-was-designed-by-crack-addled-clowns.
Also better known to the rest of the world as IBM engineers.
It's the biggest circus on earth.
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
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Hi! This is offtopic, but as a former slackware admin, I've got to ask. How did you manage to scale it to a large environment?
I got to a few dozen machines and used to spend all my time patching and admining multiple users. I eventually moved to CentOS authenticated over AD with Likewise Open. I'm interested in hearing how other people do it.
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I agree with some of your comments.
SMITTY is ugly, but I think it's a good tool. The best feature is that it constructs the command line commands rather than trying to modify configuration files or re-write the tools. This means that anything that you can do via smitty can be easily scripted even if you don't have much AIX experience.
For some workloads Linux will kick the pants of AIX. For others, especially those that require high throughput, the story is different. AIX on pSeries can move massive amounts
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Actually the hardware that AIX typically runs on beats the pants off of x86. I have consolidated almost all of my various x86 boxen to POWER (System P 570) running RHEL 4 & 5.
If you think smitty is bad, you've never tried yast.
I sort of snicker at all the wanking over the state of virtualization on x86 when I've already got superior capabilities on my POWER systems in carving up dynamic LPARs.
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Once you know your way around the pitfalls, it's OK-ish to run, administer and use. But, given the cost of the OS and the hardware, why bother?
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While it is possible to install GNU utils an
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I used it ages ago and remember thinking it was the most broken software with a version number past 3 I had ever seen. Non-standard and quirky, too.
The future of IBM desktops? (Score:2)
If there is any meaningful demand for the AIX desktop systems, I would think it would be worth money to someone, and hence IBM would follow their usual strategy of blundering the protift potential by selling it off to someone else to make money on it instead.
"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.
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So, if you replace "system" with "shit" or "windows", do you still stand by it?
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Interesting quote.. Usually you hear it the other way around - where people hate what they don't understand.
I've had a unixish system at home for the last 20 years and managed to score full marks on my RHCE so you could assume I understand unix and I do not feel I'm about to hate it!
One of the strengths of unixish systems is that skills are transferable. The ideas of processes with a parent of "init", a path, shells, forked tasks, everything a socket lets you understand how things work together which helps
Somehow this remembers me 1995 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Somehow this remembers me 1995 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Most of the classic 8-bit CPUs have variable-length instruction coding, multiple-clock instructions controlled by state machines, and support indexed memory addressing modes and memory writes on general operations (instead of dedicated load/store instructions). All of these are hallmarks of a CISC architecture.
The 6502 may have had a few RISC like features if you pretend that the first 256 bytes of memory are registers, but it still doesn't really qualify as genuine RISC.
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
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Fixstars (formerly Terra Soft) offers a power-based workstation called the PowerStation [fixstars.com], running Yellow Dog Linux. I think it's a new product. There was a review in the latest issue of Linux Journal. It mentioned a few problems, including X crashing (but that may have been fixed by now).
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Fedora runs great on my System P 520 workstation.
Ubuntu won't even install. That would have been my first choice. But Fedora works great.
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.
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.
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Only now??????? Where have you been in the past decade.
The last outfit I worked that was using CATIA, the windows machines outnumbered AIX dekstop boxes like 10 to 1. And even the high end AIX gfx were starting to seriously under perform compared to the Quadros in the PeeCees.
Same thing for NASTRAN. I am no fan of windows, but Dassault, PTC et al have focused on the Windows versions for a while now. And that is because the price/performance of AIX workstations hasn't been there in a loooooong while.
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.
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)
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CDE is still standard on Solaris (you can choose between CDE and GNOME at install time), which runs on SPARC and x86 systems...
The school I graded from used CDE. First on AIX boxes in the unix lab, then they shifted to Solaris on x86 (cheaper desktops).
CDE is nice in a minimalistic way (though I'd choose blackbox or fluxbox over it). Actually there are tonnes of lightweight WMs I'd choose over it. Basically any that aren't tiled. Of course the choice at that time was between CDE and an early version of gnome. Most windows users would choose gnome, but CDE was the way to go if you wanted to get anything done as gnome wasn't the m
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CDE is still standard on Solaris (you can choose between CDE and GNOME at install time), which runs on SPARC and x86 systems.
True, but CDE is no longer supported on OpenSolaris [opensolaris.org]; which is a much better choice for desktop user than Solaris 10. The upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 version, and update to OpenSolaris 2008.05 has many more improvements that make it a viable alternative to GNU/Linux on the desktop or laptop.
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[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Respectfully, it's "beautiful", one L. :-)
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CDE has some nice features, like dropping icons into menus, stuff like that. (You first created an action script using a desktop applet, and then dropped the icon into a menu.) BTW, the idea of desktop applets comes from CDE; basically everything was controlled by a script, IIRC.
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
Other than for AIX server admins... why? (Score:2)
Seriously, what use do you have for this unless you're working in an AIX server environment? Even then it would be of dubious value methinks. I hate to take a question and say use something else like Linux or OS X, but... yeah.
More detail perhaps on why AIX on the desktop is useful? And if there aren't many reasons, then we know why it was killed.
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...)
In a day like this when Linux can hardly find way (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
AIX - Ain't Unix anyway ;-)
Sun did the same thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. I found smit to be a real pain in the rear to use. I'm glad I don't have to use AIX for my stuff.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see that ever happening. The veterans like AIX and Solaris provide a consistency and stability that Linux cannot. Linux is a chaotic and anarchistic mess that I find difficult to maintain on an enterprise level. Having the OS developed in a controlled environment and tightly coupled to the hardware makes for predictability and a limited set of variable that allows for refinement.
Don't get me wrong. GNU is awesome. I've had to put up with too much crap from the linux distros that ends up making
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
it'll go to.
See? The problems of using GOTO. You use it and in the end you don't even know what you meant.