Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Developing Open Source on AIX

I was recently pricing some AIX gear for supporting my work on Apache Karaf and quickly became depressed on the totals -- no surprise of course, UNIX is never cheap (to be completely fare HP-UX and Sun/Oracle non-x86 systems are also pricey). Looking around the net for alternatives turned up very few leads. I guess one is left with having to look for used systems from a reputable reseller or on ebay.
Since my projects are mostly Java based I have spent some time crafting a Ubuntu Linux VM loaded with IBM Java, and tweaking the shell & environment to be more AIX like. This has served my needs well for the most part, unfortunately there is no substitute for a real working AIX system.
This process has left me wondering how have other open source developers approached supporting this platform? Please leave your insights and experiences in the comments below.

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