IBM AIX Information and Software

AIX was developed as IBM's UNIX OS first appearing on the IBM RT workstation. Due to the struggles with OS/2 for x86 and PPC, AIX was often used in its place since it was fully developed. As a result systems like the ThinkPad 850, most RS/6000s and POWER IntelliStations used it; marking a brief window when AIX was fitted with sound and more in-depth graphics capabilities, and in the case of the 850 and RS/6000s, a webcam.

AIX in its present iteration, especially 7.2 and beyond are considered server-exclusive operating systems. However, that doesn't mean you can't try compiling things for the OS and fitting the hardware with graphics cards and a sound card.

Downloads

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.8 CD-ROM for AIX

When you're installing AIX from scratch, it gives the option to install Firefox automatically with the (optional) Firefox CD as part of the final installation for AIX 5.3 and 6.1. As this CD is rather hard to find, there is an ISO of the image included here. It happens to contain Firefox 3.5.8 (which isn't the latest version of Firefox for AIX--the latest being Firefox 3.5.16-2), however this will automatically install all of the dependencies in the correct order and have a working build of Firefox for your installation ready soon as you log into the desktop.

Note #1: you won't be able to use Michael Perzl's packages if you use this as they are built in an incompatible way. You would have to work the other way around by installing Perzl's packages and then the surrounding AIX Toolbox ones from there.

Note #2: IBM removed the ability to use this on the installer on AIX 7.1+, so the browser would have to be installed manually anyways.

• AIX Toolbox (2002 - LCD4-1077-06)
• AIX Toolbox (2004)
• AIX Toolbox (2006 - LCD4-1077-15)
• AIX Toolbox (2007 - LCD4-1077-16)
• AIX Toolbox (2008 - LCD4-1077-20)

A collection of the various free AIX® Toolbox for Linux™ Applications discs. The AIX Toolbox provides ports and applications from Linux / GNU. Extremely useful if you're looking for installing some productivity applications as well, such as XMMS, The GIMP, XPDF, along with a base set of libraries used for loads of other applications/games etc. Be advised not all of the programs are consistently on every release (XMMS was removed in 2006 and beyond), so, you'll need to statically link the earlier versions to be used with newer versions of the Toolbox, or with Perzl's stuff.

The newer ones are still available directly from IBM so the focus here is archiving the older images. The new AIX Toolbox packages are phasing out some of the desktop productivity software which is why I wanted to archive these--along with the fact anyone who is running an old AIX system may want these legacy packages as well.

Bonus Pack / Ultimedia Extensions

In AIX 4, the "AIX Ultimedia Services/6000" was released for allowing advanced graphical and sound capabilities on AIX, these were included on the 'Bonus Pack' CD-ROMs that came with AIX. Apparently after version 4 IBM stopped including this service as to deter multimedia development on the platform.

Mounting a CD-ROM

Mounting a CD/DVD in AIX isn't necessarily required to do most functions, mounting it will actually cause it to be stuck to the one CD until a system restart--so, again you don't necessarily need to mount it. You just need to point SMIT or the system manager to the CD drive and it'll pick up the structure just fine if there are packages and/or TOC.

Installp / RPM and AIX Toolbox

AIX's native format is actually installp, but less and less software uses this. Therefore for most things AIX stores its packages in an old RPM format inherited from Redhat, as a result of the old RPM package, dependency hell is a common thing in AIX. And most famously if you're going to use Perzl's packages (some of which are not actually tested anymore) you have to choose between 100% Perzl or 100% IBM Toolbox. Of course you can get around this with static linking (which honestly for some of the older AIX packages, this should be done). Then you can mix and match sub-programs between Perzl and the AIX Toolbox.

Here are the common FTP sites where the AIX Toolbox RPMs can be downloaded from:
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/
http://gnome.bullfreeware.com/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/
ftp://www.oss4aix.org/RPMS/

AIX Custom Backgrounds

AIX natively supports custom backgrounds through CDE (Common Desktop Environment), but AIX CDE is older and has a few extra steps. Also provided here are pre-converted backgrounds for use that can immediately be placed in AIX; I chose the most commonly used resolutions in AIX (I think 1080p began support on AIX 7.1 but that may be incorrect).

Cat Face	IBM Logos	Snow Train	Vader
(Preview)	(Preview)	(Preview)	(Preview)
800 x 600	800 x 600	800 x 600	800 x 600
1024 x 768	1024 x 768	1024 x 768	1024 x 768
1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024
1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200
1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080

Linus	Aesthetic	Night	Pineapple
(Preview)	(Preview)	(Preview)	(Preview)
800 x 600	800 x 600	800 x 600	800 x 600
1024 x 768	1024 x 768	1024 x 768	1024 x 768
1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024	1280 x 1024
1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200	1600 x 1200
1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080

How to create custom background on AIX CDE

1. Create your backdrop the size(s) of the monitors you'll be using it on, like 1600x1200 or whatever
2. Reduce the colour of the final image to 80 coloursor less (save as PNG format as JPEG will re-encode and add more colours again)
3. Convert the outputted colour reduced PNG to a XPM (i.e. yourimage.png to yourimage.xpm)
4. Rename yourimage.xpm to yourimage.pm (apparently AIX CDE references .pm instead of .xpm, even though they're the same file type)
5. Copy it to: /usr/dt/backdrops
6. Edit the desc.C text document with another definition for your image (yourimage.pm) now added to the catalogue

If you're just downloading one from above and using that, you'll just need to copy it over into /usr/dt/backdrops and then edit desc.C as appropriate.

AIX Desktop Applications and Dependencies

AIX doesn't have a good dependency management (and this is worsened due to the fact IBM does not package all GNU and open source software). So this makes managing packages even worse since not all packages compiled by different parties will be interoperable. This page aims to map all of the dependencies so the order for what needs to be installed is known, and also how much proprietary and open source software AIX has available to it.

After extended testing it wasn't really possible to reconcile the AIX Toolbox and Perzl packages. I would strongly suggest picking one or the other, and using static links to build the packages that are not in extant in either one. I'm leaving the below chart up for posterity.

Dependency Chart (Deprecated)

Notice: text highlighted in red means a potential package conflict (with AIXToolBox and Michael Perzl's packages), text highlighted in blue refers to a regular application and not necessarily a library or being dependent on something else.

Note: depending if you're using IBM's AIX Toolbox packages or Michael Perzl's OSS4AIX packages, xcursor and libxcursor and the others will have a conflict so you have to choose which ones you want to use, it also changes the order in which they are to be installed. I would probably suggest statically linking the unique AIX 4.3.3 ones from the AIX Toolbox to freely use them with Perzl as the main base?

When you're installing the packages, you can either do it through SMIT or even through the graphical web manager (removed after AIX 6.1) and point to a CD-ROM or package(s) that you've downloaded. You don't actually have to mount the CD-ROM when you're using the graphical System Manager because it's intelligent enough to look there (you only ever have to 'mount' a CD-ROM in AIX under unique circumstances but generally it's best to ignore).

If setting up NFS isn't desirable you can burn all of the packages necessary on a DVD or format a USB stick with JFS, copy over the files, and then mount the USB stick to AIX and copy everything from there--probably the most favourable option even if JFS isn't designed as a removable mass storage filesystem. Update: it appears formatting USB sticks with JFS is very temperamental, at least with AIX 5.1 ~ 7.1, you'll be stuck with DVDs. Unless maybe you can create a virtual ISO on the USB stick?

Applications Listing

Audio

• ESounD
• mpg123/flac123
• Open Cubic Player
• Open Sound System (OSS)
• SoX
• XMMS1

Graphics

• The GIMP
• xpaint
• CorelDRAW 3.5 (for UNIX)
• Alias PowerAnimator (presently the version for AIX is lost media)
• CATIA 4 & 5
• Unigraphics
• Blender

Games

• Abuse
• Angband
• DOSBox
• Nethack
• PrBoom
• Powermanga
• Quake 1
• Quake 2
• xshogi (gnushogi)

Documentation

• AbiWord
• Adobe Acrobat 3.02b (for UNIX)
• Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 (for UNIX)
• Corel WordPerfect 6.0 (for UNIX)
• LaTeX
• NEdit
• xpdf

Utilities

• 7zip
• gzip
• VNC
• xv Image Viewer
• Wireshark
• PuTTY

Virtualisation

• SoftPC/SoftWindows (for AIX)
• WABI 2.0 (for AIX)
• QEMU
• Bochs

Programming

• Free Pascal
• Eclipse
• Visual Age 6.0 for AIX
• XL/C C++
• GCC

IRC Clients

• Irssi
• X-Chat

Note: it should be noted the unfortunate naming scheme of "OSS" (open source software) and "OSS" (open sound system). In the case of OSS/AIX that always refers to the open sound system for AIX, in the case of OSS4AIX that always refers to Michael Perzl's ported open source software to AIX.

Forgotten AIX x86 Emulation

When the IBM RT first debuted, it came with an optional add-on 286 board that provided physical processing of x86 instruction sets inside AIX / therefore any x86 program--particularly PC-DOS--could be ran inside AIX concurrently with anything else. Later IBM released a similar version of the emulator but in software form. It appears the emulation later went into software and then ultimately retired with the advent of AI 5.3L. Fortunately DOS Box has been ported over to AIX by Michael Perzl: http://www.perzl.org/aix/index.php?n=Main.Dosbox. Unfortunately I don't believe Perzl implemented the sound support (which could be implemented).