[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com>]

On 3/13/24 14:27, Will Senn wrote:
> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning to see 
> how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so OpenIndiana's a 
> bust)... 

You might not find Solaris much more to your liking then, since Solaris 11.0
and later only include the GNOME desktop. (Solaris 2.6 through 10 also had
CDE, and Solaris 1.0 through 8 also had OpenWindows.)  In Solaris 11.4, it's
GNOME 3 - up to GNOME 41 in SRU 66.

OpenIndiana went with MATE instead of GNOME 3, and I believe has some other
desktop choices as well.  The Tribblix distro of illumos offers a choice of
Xfce, Mate, OpenCDE, or Enlightenment on top of the same core OS derived from
OpenSolaris.

> but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least for hobbyists (only get 
> release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to date 'release' was 11.4 in 
> 2018).

There's also the "CBE" release from 2022 to allow people building open source
to build & test on a somewhat newer base:
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/announcing-the-first-oracle-solaris-114-cbe

It's roughly equivalent to a beta build of Solaris 11.4 SRU 42.  (Solaris 11.4
issues "Support Repository Updates" or SRUs around once a month, so the SRU
number is basically the count of the number of months after August 2018 that
a given SRU was released.)

But yeah, if you want to stay up to date, you need a support contract.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris