Current Unix Flavors: under active development and usage.
- AIX
IBM's own Unix. Based on System V, with some BSD extensions, and many IBM-originated peculiarities.
Currently runs only on the IBM POWER processor architecture, specifically IBM System p servers. (Formerly
known as p-Series, formerly known as RS/6000). AIX V7.1 was released in the last quarter 2010, and it is
still not widely deploy. AIX versions 6.1 (released 2007) and 5.3 (2004) are common, and even some old
RS/6000 machines may be found in production running AIX 4.3.3, released in 1999.
Is not uncommon for Unix administrators coming from other platforms to find some of the AIX features
odd, strange or even heretic and against the Unix Philosophy. To mention a few: the logging subsystem or
the ODM configuration database.
Virtualization is a strong area for AIX. PowerVM, as is commercially known the current System p + AIX
offering, is arguably the most advanced Unix virtualization platform available today.
Links: IBM Home Page for AIX
- Solaris
The Unix from Sun, now acquired by Oracle. Previously known as SunOS, which was based on BSD. After SunOS 4,
released in the early 90's, Sun rewrote its OS and named it Solaris, this time based on System V Release 4. So SunOS 5.x
was really Solaris 2.x. You can still see the SunOS name on any modern Solaris system, for example "uname -a" will return
"SunOS 5.10" on a current Solaris 10. The late financial troubles in Sun, and the purchase by Oracle in 2009, had casted some
doubts and caused the Solaris market share to shrink, but still remains one of the top commercial Unixes out there.
Links: Home Page for Oracle (formerly Sun) Solaris
- HP-UX
Hewlett-Packard's Unix, since version 10 (1995) based on System V Release 4. Seems to have lost some market share to AIX and
Linux during the last few years, but remains as one of the three "Big Commercial Unixes" together with AIX and Solaris.
Links: HP-UX home page at hp.com
- Linux
The Intel 80386 processor, released in 1985, was a very advanced and powerful CPU for its time. Sadly, there was no readily
available operating system that would make use of the chip's capabilities. Microsoft was selling the Windows addon to its
D.O.S. product, OS/2 was only targetting the 80286, Minix was mainly of academic interest and commercial Unix offerings were
very expensive. Enter Linus Torvalds.
Linus got a hold of a 386 PC and started his own operating system. He used Minix for development until Linux was able to
support itself, at the end of 1991. Then he decided to use the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the snowball began to roll.
Today Linux runs on small appliances up to mainframe and supercomputer systems.
Links: Linux Kernel - Linux.com -
Debian GNU/Linux