[TUHS] How good a representative of System V is Solaris

[Tim Bradshaw]

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