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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, it's just you.
Q: What happens when AIX is downsized?
A: It gets the AX!
Haw haw, thank you, I'll be here all week!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Deleted
Early on, it was said that Linux would kill more Unixs than Windows ever would.
From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.
- Tony
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.
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.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
Someone hates these cans.
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.
To elaborate: He's bemoaning that this beautyfull desktop is being discontinued. A true catastrophe that will set back the entire industry by years to come.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
slashdot broke my sig
YellowDog makes a PowerPC based Linux machine. The latest Linux Journal has a review of it:
http://us.fixstars.com/products/powerstation/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10263
Not perfect, but workable.
RISC still is the future. Or haven't you noticed how ARM is outselling all other CPU architectures combined?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I am outraged!
(Better be careful--I might take my ball and head back to VMS...)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]