Unix distro closest to AIX
 

Guys,


Do you know of any Unix distro (BDS, etc) that could be tagged as the closest to IBM AIX? Or is there anything like that?

Cheers!

It is IBM AIX. So please tell us what do you really want: learn AIX without using AIX?

Exactly, I'd like to learn Unix without spending a lot of money.

Unless you would tell met that the likes of BSD (or Linux for that matter) should be sufficient?

AIX is one of the many Unix-like OS's. So are the different Linux distributions. Neither of them is more Unix that the others.
(And all of them have their own quirks, for example AIX likes to store shared objects in *.a archives. Can be very problematic.)

Hi work with both AIX (The company server) and linux (my PC) on a daily basis and I find that IBM is vary reluctant to change so I would look at one of the older distros and passably an old version of it. (Of course no GUI!) So I would go for an old distro that runs the corn shell.

CentOS or Slackware, perhaps.

They are all a bit different - Unixes.

AIX is quite old and proprietary so there is nothing is quite like it.

This may give you some idea:

http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

HTH

There are guides out there for running AIX 4.3 on older PowerPC desktops. 4.3 is not all that different than current 6.1 and 7.1 versions insofar as command structure, syntax, smitty, etc... Of course, you won't be using AIX 4.3 to do advanced micro-partitioning, building out VIO servers. Still, if your goal is to just learn command syntax, basic AIX file structure and all that, it would work fine. You can find AIX install cd's on eBay and the like, but they are becoming harder to come by.

Thanks for all the replies, really appreciate it.

AIX uses ksh so I would imagine a good knowledge of that would be useful

AIX isn't unix like. It's a unix variant and it's more unix than linux because it actually complies to unix specifications.

What do you mean by 'unix specifiction'? Posix?

I think that's what he's referring to.

Might be so, but let's keep in mind posix doesn't mean 'unix' or 'unix-like'. It means 'portable OS Interface'. Even Windows has (used to have) posix-compatible API.