IBM Corp. Friday will roll out the latest
trick in its Linux affinity bag with its AIX Toolkit for Linux
applications.
The toolkit enables developers to build and package Linux
applications for use on the IBM eServer family running AIX, IBM’s
heralded UNIX operating system.
Although the AIX toolkit for Linux apps offers a fairly common
set of development tools and utilities, Tilak Agerwala, vice
president UNIX Marketing and Product Management for IBM, said the
product maintains open source maxims; namely, by providing
customers with greater flexibility in implementing their e-business
solutions.
“With the introduction of AIX 5L, customers have more freedom to
run the applications they want on the hardware they want,” Agerwala
said.
Big Blue feels AIX 5L will answer customers’ e-business demands
for an platform with plenty of headroom and investment protection,
without saddling them with a closed solution.
Senior analyst for research firm Abderdeen Bill Claybrook
concurred, saying IBM’s play was a strong one because it allows the
technology giant to solidify AIX as the leading open,
industrial-strength UNIX operating system by leveraging its
leadership in features/functionality, price/performance, and
scalability capabilities on the Power and Intel Itanium
architectures.
“IBM’s integrated UNIX/Linux OS strategy, with support for
simple to complex mission-critical workloads, is designed to make
every customer choice the right one,” Claybrook said.
The AIX toolkit contains a collection of open source and GNU
software built for AIX 4.3.3 and AIX 5L. These tools provide the
base of the development environment of choice for many Linux
application developers. Applications in the toolkit include,
recompiled versions of the Gnome and KDE desktop environments,
system utilities such as emacs, Samba and Zip, libraries, shells,
GNU base utilities, and application development tools, including
gcc, g++, RPMand Autoconf.
The end result IBM is aiming for is to help business customers
combine the flexibility of Linux with the advanced scalability and
availability features ofAIX including, 32 and 64-bit APIs, workload
management, system management tools and cluster software.
For IBM, the deal signals its dertermination to work with Linux
as much as possible. In 2000, IBM partnered with Red Hat and
invested in TurboLinux,
both of which agreed to support Big Blue’s new eServer line.
TurboLinux also expanded
its partnership with Big Blue Wednesday.