SPARC Live CD?

[Paul Lussier]

Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com> writes:

> As I said in other message, it's just annoying that the utilities are 
> 'different' - I'm used to Linux far more than Solaris.  When I type ps, I 
> expect following it with aux will give me lots of good info.  With Solaris, 
> it's ps -ef.

I almost *never* use 'aux' on Linux.  It's almost always -elf :)

> When I am tarballing up a directory and type tar cfvz _tarball_
> _stuff_, I get an error because gzip isn't included.  I wouldn't
> even imagine of trying bzip2 instead.

Yeah, I never use tar -z to compress stuff.  I almost always do it in
2 steps, one to tar, one to compress.  Usually because I want to add a
-9 to either bzip2 or gzip, and at one time, -z on tar didn't do that
(It may now, I don't know).

> It's a matter of familiarity - I seem to have rubbed a few Solaris
> fans the wrong way perhaps.

I wouldn't call myself a Solaris fan, I haven't really used it in
about 5 or 6 years.  But I know it well enough to feel at home there
and found your description of "painfully lacking" a bit extreme.

> I can check the man pages and relearn command line arguments and I
> can search the various paths for files that aren't in my working
> path for one reason or another

Hmmm, I seem to check man pages by instinct and make liberal use of
-(-)h(elp).  As far as stuff not being in my $PATH, ahm, that's
*almost* not possible :)

> (though not with locate because that's not there).

Locate is too often wrong (i.e. not up-to-date) to be dependable for me.

> But let me reiterate - I just want to quickly go around the
> filesystem, find potentially interesting data, tarball it up, and
> store it away for future analysis so I can wipe the machine for now
> and start putting it to use.  A Live CD, especially with Linux would
> have been helpful, but I'm getting along with what I know just fine.

I guess it's a difference of opinions and experience.  To me, the
amount of time spent looking for, downloading, and burning the
appropriate Live CD would have been far greater than a simple perusal
of a couple of man pages.  If I found that I *really* needed something
from GNU or Linux that Solaris was missing, I'd extract the drive from
the Sparc and mount it under Linux and just us rsync/cp/mv/tar to put
it where I can easily get at it rather than mess with a LiveCD distro.
At least that way I'd also have my own home directory, shell,
environment, and extensions at my disposal as well.

I view LiveCDs as either a nice way to try out a new distro or an
indispensable recovery tool when there's absolutely no other easier
way.  Again, just my opinion.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul
--
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