AIX

Thanks...I'm just searching for that as a source...its always a bit tricky knowing where to start when your a newbie to a new OS, you don't want to be wasting time looking in the wrong place. Thank god for the internet though, there seems to be an endless source of information, its just a matter of sifting the good from the bad from the ugly!

You have already been given plenty of good advice in this thread, but I thought I may be able to contribute a little more. I consider The Linux Command Line to be the best book to learn Linux from scratch. Yes, in the first pages of the book the author says that the book is very Linux-centric, but you will find tons of useful information there that also applies to other Unix-like environments, such as AIX. Believe me. And not only it is a great book, but also you can download it for free from the book's website at LinuxCommand.org. Good luck!

AIX/Linux are not that hard - but coming from an IBM i/OS400 background you will probably find it daunting in the beginning. *NIX is meant to be open, which means not only may you choose how to do something, you have to choose.

As far as human factors go - *NIX is probably poor if you have to learn from the command-line only. But as you master the CLI (command-line-interface) you will be able to do more, and do it with greater efficiency.

IMHO - as you get to the CLI level of any *NIX system you will see more similarities than differences, but those differences will be large to medium large when it comes to system administration. Other differences are missing, or different meanings for an option. Two commands I have issues with (AIX compared to other *NIX) are netstat and ifconfig. So learning Linux will help, and there is a large and growing market for administrators - separate from whether you are also administrating the virtualization of the machines.

In short: new to AIX - learn smit(ty) and use F8 (to learn the fastpath) and F6 to learn the commands. And/or after usig smit read script.script and/or smit.log to review what you have done.

It is probably easier to get a practice Linux system than a practice AIX system. Just remember - although there are many similarities AIX != Linux and v.v.

Welcome to the world of *NIX!