AIX

I work for a health care company part of my job is to run checks we use a telnet session that we use AIX 6 commands. I have almost no programming experience but i want to learn it, we have a programmer here but he has no time my question is,, Is there anything that allows you to program a GUI interface from a telnet session with using AIX commands? OR am i all backwards here i know commands allows the out puts, but i want something that all u have to do is select buttons for all commands i type in a Telnet session, can anyone help me on this to understand what i need to do?

thanks

If you want to use GUI, you will need a X server on whatever you use remotely to access the AIX box ( Reflection X , Hummingbird , cygwin or any PC called X emulator... for PC running win...) and export your DISPLAY variable correctly, then you have the choice since you are talking or developping, either use JAVA or native X11...

we use putty to login to server with telnet.

in my honest opinion... AIX gui is not useful and i've had a few contracts to help out a lot of heath care offices in toronto GTA region and we mostly disable the x server. best suggestion to you is learn the commands.

luckly AIX has a savior! its called Smit.

get familiar with this if your a beginner everything you do in smit if you

Code:

use F6 or esc 6

you can see the command that they ran.

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also if you post what kind of checks your looking to do we maybe able to help you out... lots of really smart guys on here...

I started on Linux many years ago and basically took what i knew from there when i came into AIX. remember concepts are more the less the same... some differences but knowing the right questions to ask well defiantly help you

If you can login with ssh, that's preferred over telnet. It's not only more secure, it's also far easier to automate.

If I understand what you're asking, PowerTerm emulator may be a solution for you. I used to use PowerTerm at my old job instead of putty. It has programmable buttons you can click on to do any command you setup. For example you could setup one button to do

Code:

df -g

and another button to do

Code:

lsdev -Cc disk

, etc. You can download a 30 day free license at download.cnet.com if you want to try it out.

You might want to read this post or this one for a brief explanation how X-Windows works and what the words mean.

Contrary to what vpundit says my opinion is that the AIX GUI (the one called AIXWindows) is a very useful one. If i could get it on my my laptop i would choose it any day - and twice on sundays - over these convoluted desktop systems like GNOME, KDE and whathaveyou. (Alas, modern Linuxes refuse to fully work without having such resource sinks running, which makes you wonder if they are any better than the glorified graphical interrupt handler from Redmond, but that only as an aside.)

But as you most probably have no "lft" (terminal which could be switched into a graphical mode) installed in your AIX box the discussion is academic because you probably lack the equipment to run AIXWindows on the AIX box. The second best option is to run some Linux from your desktop system (PC, Laptop, ...) as any Linux system has some installable X-server you could use. Another option is to install some X-server program on top of what you run right now (i suppose it to be Windoze). There are several to choose from, arguably the most prominent being Hummingbird Exceed. Install this or some equivalent program and you can display X-clients like "xterm" at your display.

"Smitty" is a very good tool to carry out system administration tasks, but will help you nothing if you want to use the system like a user does. You can create and change network interfaces there or create and change file ystems, but you will not find a dialog like "to write a letter click here". If this is what you want to do get a book like "Unix for Dummies" or something similar and read that.

I hope this helps.

bakunin