AIX Operating System

 The AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) operating system is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems by IBM. It's based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions and was the first operating system to have a journaling file system, with continuous enhanced features such as processor, disk and network virtualization, dynamic hardware resource allocation, and reliability engineering. The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is AIX's default graphical user interface, with open-source KDE Plasma Workspaces and GNOME desktop also available.

SMIT is the System Management Interface Tool for AIX. It allows a user to navigate a menu hierarchy of commands, rather than using the command line. The F6 function key generates the command line that SMIT will invoke to complete it, while the smit.script file automatically records the commands with the command flags and parameters used, being useful to rerun system configuration tasks.

Smitty also refers to the same program, though it invokes the text-based version, while smit will bring up an X Window System based interface by searching for the DISPLAY variable. Failure to fire up the x window system will instead present the text interface.

Object Data Manager (ODM) is a database of system information integrated into AIX, akin to the registry in Microsoft Windows. Data managed in ODM is stored as objects with associated attributes. Command-line utilities such us odmshow, odmget, odmadd, odmchange and odmdelete allow for interaction with ODM. ODM is stored on disk using Berkeley DB files.