AIX vs Linux? How similar are the two OSes?

[chsh1ca]

Just curious for the real sysadmins here, how tough is AIX to work with? I have a potential job opportunity coming up through a friend, and it requires thorough knowledge of standard unix services like LPD, DHCPd, BIND, etc.. It will be working with AIX on RS/6000s, but I don't have any direct experience. There is a two week allotted train-in time for whomever is hired, but I would want to be comfortable going in.

My experience with linux isn't graphical based, and I've run FreeBSD before as well. I'm just curious as to whether I might be able to make that leap in any practical useful sense to a prospective employer. Comments/Suggestions?

 

[quikah]

I have used Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux fairly extensively. Let me go on record that I HATE HP-UX (probably due to the craptacularly slow systems we are running it on), everything else is good.

They all have the same general concepts, you just need to learn different syntax. AIX makes this pretty simple by providing a nice graphical administration tools called smit. Just click for what you need, works well for most daytoday uses. It is basically a graphical interface to their cmd-line tools. When you run an operation in smit a window opens showing all the comands being run, playing around with this you will get a good idea of the various cmd-line tools to use.

You should bookmark the Unix Rosetta stone, gives "translations" for all commands in the various unices:
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

 

[chsh1ca]

Originally posted by: quikah
I have used Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux fairly extensively. Let me go on record that I HATE HP-UX (probably due to the craptacularly slow systems we are running it on), everything else is good.

They all have the same general concepts, you just need to learn different syntax. AIX makes this pretty simple by providing a nice graphical administration tools called smit. Just click for what you need, works well for most daytoday uses. It is basically a graphical interface to their cmd-line tools. When you run an operation in smit a window opens showing all the comands being run, playing around with this you will get a good idea of the various cmd-line tools to use.

You should bookmark the Unix Rosetta stone, gives "translations" for all commands in the various unices:
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Awesome link! Thanks for the info, here I am, worrying it's tremendously fundamentally different, but I thought it wouldn't be, as it IS unix.