this is monolith
I’m typing this from the Intellistation POWER 275. It’s a very fast machine compared to the Octane (heh). Dual 1.45GHz CPUs and 4GBs of RAM will do that for you. Unfortunately the keyboard layout is kinda whacked since the arrow keys and pageup/pagedown keys aren’t working quite right, but it’s the only English layout that gives me a pipe character.
The Intellistation uses really rare disk trays with a PCB with gold traces instead of just using the SCA connector on most SCSI drives. This makes it a real pain in the ass to find. I found a 36GB one for 30EURs, and boy it’s great to have more than 9GB on a workstation for a change! Initially AIX made really really small partitions, but since resizing a partition (or in IBM parlance logical volume/filesystem) on AIX is as easy as chfs -a size=xM/G, where M is for megabytes and G for gigabytes, it really isn’t a big deal at all. The bigger deal is that you can’t shrink them, but that’s for later. You can also pool multiple physical volumes (hard drives) together to make a huge volume (err.. JBOD, but done by the OS instead of dedicated hardware).
Sound isn’t working yet. The last I’ve heard of sound on AIX is in 5.1, where 4Front released drivers for it. Overall, I’d say AIX isn’t really all that, unless you really want to use it as a server. Then it’s a great OS – if I were a server admin, I’d really appreciate being able to resize filesystems on the fly (that is, within 10 seconds). I’ll probably get a Mac Radeon 7000 PCI and boot Linux on it then… so much for the dual GXT6500Ps.
Oh yeah, I have to get 3D working. More to come folks. I have a lot of real life shit to do now.
