Solaris/x86 rant (was: Any advice on Solaris laptops?)

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Fri Jun 22 09:33:30 EDT 2007


On 6/21/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
>
> > And there's the retro naming of SunOS 4.x to Solaris 1.x.
>
> ummm, that was way more than a "retro naming".


SunOS was based on the BSD kernel and the BSD code, modified a long time
> under Sun.
>
> Solaris was based on System V.4, with Sun ripping it apart and basically
> re-writing it.



I'm talking about the naming, not the actual OS.  The original SunOS had
always been called SunOS.  When they came out with Solaris 2.x, (or SunOS
5.x) they started calling the original BSD based SunOS 4.x Solaris 1.x.  The
documentation in those days said SunOS + Openwindows == Solaris.  Without
Openwindows, it's just SunOS.  Customers just called 4.x SunOS and 5.x/2.x
Solaris.

Even worse IMO, uname -s says SunOS on both.  I had to rewrite a few shell
scripts to look at uname -r to get 4.x or 5.x.

When SunOS (BSD) was still in use, there was alot of confusion with the
names, etc.  It's been a long time since I used a SunOS system thank
goodness.  I'm sure it would feel archaic.


SunOS was related to Solaris much the same way that Ultrix (BSD based)
> was related to Digital Unix (OSF/1 ripped apart and re-written by
> Digital).


Digital changed the name too which broke fewer scripts.   I liked the way it
mixed BSDisms and SysVisms.

I ran into an issue porting csh scripts from Ultrix to SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1
(not Digital Unix yet), HP/UX and Irix.  I ended up converting it to ksh (a
good idea anyways) because *csh* in SunOS and Solaris didn't work the same
way.  I used ksh because we had a version on all the systems (we added it to
SunOS) and /bin/sh on Ultrix didn't do functions.


> As a side note we never really released a "V1.0" of Digital's OSF/1
> system.  We started with V1.2, I believe....we figured no one would use
> a V1.0 :-)


Unfortunately not enough people used Digital Unix either :-(  We went from a
Dec shop running Ultrix to a Sun shop running SunOS because the apps were
not getting ported to Digital Unix.  I liked my Dec 3000 better then the
Sparc 5s but our users needed the apps.
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