AIX

IBM's Unix operating system. The current version is 4.3. However, versions range from 3.2.5, 4.1.5, and 4.2.1. AIX runs on IBM's power 1,2,2SC processors and on PowerPC processors co-developed by IBM, Motorola, and Apple. AIX runs&of systems ranging from laptops to supercomputers.

The UNIX operating system written by IBM. Current version is 4.3.1. Previous notable versions are 4.2, 4.1.4, and 3.2.5. In 4.3.1, they changed a bunch of stuff in includes/arpa/inet.h which made lots of things I tried to compile hork and utterly fail.

AIX should be pronounced "aches," as after working with it, your head will certainly ache.

Fortunately, IBM is supposedly working on a Linux port for their RS6000 machines.

A kludge that tries to adhere to both the BSD and AT&T unix tastes. Also one of my favourite unices. It has borrowed some features from 'real' operating systems, including a virtual machine-ish approach to low-level functions like load balancing between processors, and an internal database for the sub-os/VM level configuration (like the windows registry) rather than config files.
It also uses SMIT, a nice menu-driven configuration tool that builds scripts in Korn shell (AIX' native shell) and lets the adminstrator edit the actions before committing the actions. For a novice AIXer, familiar with other unices, this is extremely helpful since many commands have strange names and args.

Powerful, but not a very clean unix implementation. It tries to provide both BSD and System V command sets by including redundant flags for most commands, but has a number of non-standard replacements for some commands as well.

With version 5, IBM has incorporated a number of things in use in the Linux world. All version 5 AIX releases have the L suffix, with L standing for, you guessed it, Linux. What this means is a number of weaknesses in AIX have been addressed. One of the most annoying things for me was the lack of a /dev/random. You always had to install prngd (Pseudo random number generator daemon) on AIX. No longer. AIX (current version is 5.3L) now has /dev/random, so openssl installs cleanly.

RPM is installed by default, so two package managers are in widespread use on current AIX servers, installp and RPM. GCC now works very well on AIX, allowing the building of a lot of the gnu software library. AIX has become a lot more flexible because of these changes. I seem to see a lot more AIX job openings nowadays as well. A lot of companies have apparently been sold on IBM's Linux affinity.

AIX runs on IBM's Power series CPUs.