22 Jun
2004
22 Jun
'04
10:15 p.m.
I've had some Unix exposure at work with AIX, and
I wanted to have Unix
at home to learn more about it.
What about Solaris x86? Sun and AT&T (the creator of UNIX) cooperated in
the early 90's. As a result, Solaris is THE Unix implemention for those
who want to learn a real Unix. Solaris 8 is free (but only as in beer,
not speech). But recently Sun has had the intention to open source it.
AIX is a wonderful and advanced OS. But it isn't original Unix (ODM,
subsytem resource manager etc., printing system, etc). From the source
code AIX is a direct descendant of original Unix. Linux is a
reimplementation of Unix, has no common source code with Unix (ok I know
SCO says otherwise), but in the end Linux is closer to Unix than AIX is.
But IBM has worked hard to make the new AIX 5 closer to Linux and System V.
Remember that Linus Torvalds has used the Solaris documentation as a
guideline to implement the Linux API, because he hadn't access to the
documents of the POSIX standard in the early days.
Patrick Kaell