28 May
2009
28 May
'09
5 p.m.
As a long-time Linux user and a long time Unix history buff, I've been
wanting to "play" with classic Unix variants for quite some time.
Obviously, Research Unix up through V7 and the BSDs are readily
available and I've at least mucked around with them, but post-V7 AT&T
Unices have always been unavailable, at least at any price that I can
afford on my college student budget. Solaris, however, at least
started out as an implementation of SVR4 and is freely available. How
much of System V still lurks inside Solaris 10 (the last version to
include such traditional workstation elements as CDE and DPS in the X
server) and how much has been removed in favor of a more GNU-ish
userland experience? Is Solaris a good way to get a System V
experience without breaking either the bank or copyright law, or is
this a hopeless situation?
Mike
28 May
28 May
5:40 p.m.
I don't think there is much similarity between solaris and the old
system v. There is some in that sun was pedantic about command
line / libc / syscall compat (to their detriment in my opinion)
but much has been changed. Just start diffing.
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 01:00:35PM -0400, Michael Kerpan wrote:
As a long-time Linux user and a long time Unix history
buff, I've been
wanting to "play" with classic Unix variants for quite some time.
Obviously, Research Unix up through V7 and the BSDs are readily
available and I've at least mucked around with them, but post-V7 AT&T
Unices have always been unavailable, at least at any price that I can
afford on my college student budget. Solaris, however, at least
started out as an implementation of SVR4 and is freely available. How
much of System V still lurks inside Solaris 10 (the last version to
include such traditional workstation elements as CDE and DPS in the X
server) and how much has been removed in favor of a more GNU-ish
userland experience? Is Solaris a good way to get a System V
experience without breaking either the bank or copyright law, or is
this a hopeless situation?
Mike
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---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com
29 May
29 May
8:34 a.m.
On 28 May 2009, at 18:00, Michael Kerpan wrote:
Solaris, however, at least
started out as an implementation of SVR4 and is freely available. How
much of System V still lurks inside Solaris 10 (the last version to
include such traditional workstation elements as CDE and DPS in the X
server) and how much has been removed in favor of a more GNU-ish
userland experience? Is Solaris a good way to get a System V
experience without breaking either the bank or copyright law, or is
this a hopeless situation?
I never (other than transiently, and even then in various heavily
bastardised versions such as Masscomps' RTU) used a Sys V Unix other
than Solaris. However I did live through the SunOS 4 -> Solaris
transition. My memory of that is that the early Solaris versions
(2.2?) seemed extremely austere and unpleasant compared with BSD-
derived systems. Solaris doesn't seem like that now, and in fact when
I play with BSD derivatives they seem quite austere.
So I would suspect that, no, Solaris is not any kind of good
representative of what System V was once like. It's not a GNUoid
userland (who knows what the next release will be like, if there is
one? OpenSolaris seems to have drifted rapidly off into optimize-the-
desktop neverland and I hope will not be representative of what the
next Solaris looks like), but it's no more representative of what
things were once like than any system still under development is
representative of what its distant ancestore were like.
(CDE is not a traditional workstation element in any real sense - it's
pretty recent. I don't think it even existed in the early Solaris 2
releases.)
--tim
5445
days inactive
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2 comments
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participants (3)
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lm＠bitmover.com -
Michael Kerpan -
Tim Bradshaw