[CentOS] Re: Slightly OT: How to learn UNIX

On Thursday 06 March 2008, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> Oh, great,  any ideas about other Unix flavors? (AIX, HP-UX)

If I were you, I would forget about AIX at least at the beginning until you 
are solid with Solaris and HP-UX. Yes, it has good market share, but it is 
too different from everything else. 

Until recently I was a lead over a 8 person Unix admin team and our policy was 
to always hire people with little experience and then move them up as they 
learn stuff. 

I usually started them on Solaris 9. It is the closest to Linux (which most 
had experience with). Then we went on to Solaris 10 - SMF and so on are a big 
step forward but you will still find a ton of pre Sol10 out there, so if you 
don't have Solaris 9 or prior experience, you're not quite there. 

Then, the next step is HP-UX. You can get a C3xx0 or J6xx0 on ebay for little 
money these days. PA-RISC is dead, but once the OS is booted, there aren't 
that many differences between running on Itanium or PA-RISC. 

Finally, if they got that far, we would add some AIX. AIX is very different 
from what you would expect in a Unix flavor, ODM and all, but then again, 
Solaris 10 has moved quite a bit away from being a traditional Unix too. 

Peter.