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."

Comments

It's not just you

[Kraegar]

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

[Amarok.Org]

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.

Re:No,

[larry bagina]

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:Don't be silly

[Hurricane78]

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. ;)

I recommend Xming instead of Exceed for X

[noc007]

If you're just need an X server on Windows to connect to your *nix box, I suggest using Xming. 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

The "tool" has experience in assembler

[DrYak]

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.