[Sussex] Solaris Networking

[Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson]

Nico

On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 10:28:07PM +0100, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson wrote:
> >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, ...
> 
> The boxes said both Solaris 1.x and SunOS 4.x, and Solaris 2.x and SunOS 
> 5.x for quite some time. Since I could find no way to buy the operating 
> system, SunOS, without the OpenWindows that made up the remainder of the 
> system, and since the OpenWindows was pointless to buy without SunOS to 
> run it on, it was like trying to separate the car with the fenders on it 
> should have a different name than the car without the fenders.

Agreed.  But once I understood what the new naming system was I could work
with it.  As I said I didn't have a problem with the Solaris name.

> >Sure this was marketing driven but that change didn't bother me.  That's
> >the sort of thing commercial companies do.
>   
> It was deliberately confusing to get people to switch over to the new 
> Solaris architecture.

I disagree there.  My Sun contacts took the time to explain the change to
me so I wasn't confused at all.

>                        I sat in on the marketing discussions for some 
> system purchases where the sales people clearly and deliberately 
> obfuscated compatibility questions, calling it SunOS or Solaris at whim 
> with whatever would make the sale.

My memory is more that the sales people didn't understand the tech behind
the names and what they really related to.  But as Sun's techies had
explained it to me I was able to untangle the "sales-speak".

>                                     It was *nasty* to have to explain 
> that the new sun4m architecture would not run the old SunOS 4.x/Solaris 
> 1.x, only the new SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x.

Luckily the projects I worked on didn't have to be ported from one 
architecture to another - but that was the nature of our business.
When we started a project we just picked the latest platform.

> Ubuntu does look promising for getting user interfaces and installers 
> right. But if you want real fun, build an interesting tool and port it 
> from one OS to the other. That's an education!

Nik B gave me a copy of Ubuntu-64 to try out.  I'm a long time Debian
user and the two distros were almost identical - only minor cosmetic
differences.  I switched back to Debian because I had already invested
the time to get a local Debian mirror up and running, and it already 
had the AMD64 packages on it.  As far as I am concerned the differences
between Ubuntu and Debian are political and ethical, not technical.

Steve

-- 
                              Steve "Dobbo" Dobson
                                steve at dobson.org
                               SussexLUG Master
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BOFH excuse #268:

Neutrino overload on the nameserver
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