This may sound stupid but anyway here it is

Is there a difference between:
1. AIX 5.1
and
2. AIX 5L for Power V5.1

Are these different products?

The reason why I am asking this is because IBM's FTP site has separate folders for AIX 51, 52, 53 and 5L. Each one of those folders has MLs which are different of course. Once I have installed an AIX using the "AIX 5L for Power V5.1" CDs and the oslevel showed 5.1.0.0. Was that an AIX 5.1? Or an AIX 5L 5.1 which is different... I am totally confused, again this may look stupid but if anybody coud clarify this to me I would greately appreciate it.

Thanks!

PS: I am still an AIX 4.3 user and not familiar at all with the AIX 5 family.

The "L" in 5L stands for Linux Affinity. Which is Linux application interoperabilty. You can check out the AIX toolbox for Linux apps at IBMs site or you may have even received a CD with this stuff on it. I believe there are some Linux compatible APIs in 5.1+ as well.

So basically my AIX 5L (which oslevel is 5.1.0.0) is in fact the same thing with AIX 5.1 ? The ML for AIX 5L on IBM's ftp server has reached 02 I think whereas the AIX 51 ML has now reached 07 I think.
Thank you for clearing this for me!
james

AIX 5L is the generic name, the generation after AIX V4 (very old people remember the old time of AIX V2 and V3).
The precise names are :
AIX 5L for POWER V5.1
AIX 5L for POWER V5.2
AIX 5L for POWER V5.3
Logically what stands AIX 5L should mean "for every release". For instance RealVNC binaries work on each release.

However, if you want to update your 5.2 system, you must choose the CD named "AIX 5L for POWER V5.2 Update", or download the updates corresponding to AIX 5.2.