IBM Still Committed to AIX

Its worth noting that IBM's AIX strategy is always subject to change. When AIX 5L was first unveiled, IBM touted Linux affinity to enable development on low end Lunix servers for the AIX platform, thus driving down development costs.

With the drive to the virtual environment, this has fallen largely by the wayside. Linux affinity does not yet allow developers to leverage the virtual environment because those technologies, such as dynamic LPAR and CoD, have not reached the Linux on Power operating systems yet.

As always with IBM, stay tuned for the latest changes.

I'm really surprised there aren't more SUSE users than this. SUSE has made more progress on POWER than Red Hat, as evidenced by the fact that SUSE supports dynamic LPAR while Red Hat doesn't (yet).

Hi i need to install Linux RHEL4 on IBM p670 box. can anybody guide the process right from scratch

The last figures I saw shows IBM grossing $5B per year from AIX and a somewhat trivial amount from Linux. That was 2004 time frame I think.

I'm very biased towards AIX but I just don't see Linux as a competitor at all. Linux may be 10,000 times better than MS's stuff. But AIX is 10,000 times that again. My office machine was often up for 18 months at a time and was rebooted only because they tested the buildings emergency power circuitry.

But I'm also very skeptical of IBM's efforts. When the RS/6000 was first released, there was a "porting center" in Austin. There were programs to get advanced information to developers. And release 3 was very well documented for an internal developers perspective. The release 3 edict was to document everything. Don't forget, this was during the "Open Software Fondation" time frame which IBM was a part of.

But by the time release 5 got here, all those things were gone. There are many items that are not documented in AIX. The port center was long gone. Third party driver and kernel development had vanished. I was on a task force to try and reinvent a development kit but nothing came from it.

Things that hard core developers like me would like to know are just not in the pubs. For me, that is a slight advantage. I was inside up until December of 2005. So I know tons of things that are not documented anywhere. But it would still be very nice to have them documented.