[Sussex] Solaris Networking

[Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 07:56:26PM +0100, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Solaris has.... interesting historical issues and variations from the 
> open source and Linux models. The misnaming of SunOS 5.x as Solaris 2.x 
> and renaming of SunOS 4.x+OpenWindows as Solaris 1.x was typical of 
> market driven nuttiness Sun has been prone to.

As I remember it SunOS was the label for the kernel that prior to the
Solaris naming was also used to reference the other software packaged
bundled with that kernel.  Solaris was the label that unified all the
software shipped in the box, the kernel, X11, OpenView, ...

Sure this was marketing driven but that change didn't bother me.  That's
the sort of thing commercial companies do.

The one that did bother me was the switch from "Solaris 2.x" to "Solaris x".
One of my contacts in Sun told me this was pure marketing, and the only 
reason was to give "Solaris" a higher version number then WindowsNT.

>                                                 And the switch from BSD 
> style UNIX with SunOs to AT&T style UNIX with Solaris caused issues.

Big issues, but that was at the height of the Unix wars, and M$ was starting
to replace the low end Unix systems with NT systems.  The move of Sun and
the others to a more unified, AT&T type Unix was their attempt to combat this.

I have a CD somewhere, that contains AT&T ABI compliant programs that was
made before Solaris x86 2.4 shipped and *was not* compiled for it.  The
packages, however, install and run no problem.  Back then running code not
compiled against your OS/libc/platform was new and very cool.

> They seem to have been reverting to BSD style UNIX due to the GNU and 
> Linux pressures. Linux, for *years*, had far more usable versions of NIS 
> and NFS than you could find on a default Sun obx.

Given the popularity of Linux now in the Unix-like area is that surprising?

> If you want to be leading edge and have a cheap play environment, 
> though, try CygWin. You can learn quite a lot about open source packages 
> and software development there, especially cross-platform work. The 
> knowledge will stand you in good stead when the architecture changes 
> under your project.

I would council against CygWin.  Don't get me wrong, CygWin is a great system.
I installed it on a Win2003 laptop I *had* to use when I worked for a 
company a few years back.  It made that system useable to me, a long time
Unix hack.  But the file naming systems on Windows meant that it never
felt quite right.  So I'd recommend going for the "real" thing.

If you are trying to determine which would be the right distro for you then
please don't just ask "Which distro is best?" - you'd be better off putting
the names into a hat a picking one at random.  90% of what you learn on
one distro will apply to the others, and 80% will apply to the rest of the
Unix like OSs (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS/X, ...).  If you can ask
questions like "Which Linux is the most popular in the server room?" or
"Which Linux is the least influenced by commercial pressures?" then this
would be a good thread to discuss the various merits of the different distros
and find the one that best fits you.

Steve
-- 
                              Steve "Dobbo" Dobson
                                steve at dobson.org
                               SussexLUG Master
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOFH excuse #400:

We are Microsoft.  What you are experiencing is not a problem; it is an undocumented feature.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/attachments/20070606/203f1191/attachment.pgp