I recently acquired a cheap dual processor RS/6000 7043-240 (233 Mhz) on eBay to play around with. I'm planning on dual booting it with AIX and Linux. With dual 233 Mhz procs and 128MB of RAM (although I may upgrade that if necessary), would it be wiser to get AIX 5.1L or to get AIX 4.x? I have 6.7 GB of storage across two drives, a 4.5 GB and 2.2 GB drive. I assume I can span AIX across both drives if it's larger than 4.5 GB. Also, this is a bit off topic, but can AIX read ext2 or ext3 partitions?

Thanks,
Tim

1) Remember that Linux on RS6000 is Linux for a big server, it costs a lot of money. Moreover, you will need to have the distro for your system, I already tried to install the distro of a system to another type of system, it did not install.
2) Remember that you ned one set of disks for AIX (your two disks are enough and I would suggest AIX 5.1), and a second set of disks for the Linux OS boot.
3) I would be surprised if the AIX lvm accepted to mount Linux ext2 ou ext3 filesystems.

1) Remember that Linux on RS6000 is Linux for a big server, it costs a lot of money. Moreover, you will need to have the distro for your system, I already tried to install the distro of a system to another type of system, it did not install.


Zorba can you eloborate on this.


Linux is for a big server, are you implying that you can only install linux on a heavy duty RS6000 box, and thats what costs a lot of money? What do you mean by distro of a system, I'm familiar with different linux distros, but not sure what you meant by that.

The reason I ask is I have a cheap ebay AIX box (single proc), that eventaully I might try to install linux on.


TIA,

Boyd

The same operating systems runs exactly the same way, on the small one-cpu box and on the huge 64-cpu boxes.
That's why IBM marketing people decided that their software has to be paid, and the price is rather hight.
That's why it will probably not be easy to find a free software distro for Linux on your RS6000 boxe.
By the way, I'm also looking for a fully fonctional free Linux distro on RS6000, so if you find one I'm interested. The free ones I found on the web installed, but never booted.

there are a lot of linux distros for an rs/6000 ... here is the tutorial i used to install debian4ppc... (as i tried, aix runs thousands times better than linux)

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IBM7248-HOWTO/

@MD3 : this tutorial seems really great ! I'll read it carefully and try again.