[TUHS] SunOS 4 in 2024

[TUHS] SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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Hi all,

I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Erik E. Fair]

Henry,

I think you're going to be a whole lot happier with NetBSD or OpenBSD on 32-bit Sun SPARC hardware than trying to coax SunOS into a usable state for the modern, unfortunately rather hostile, Internet.

However, I think you're also going to want to make use of the cross-compilation tools provided, i.e., build software on [ugh] fast x86 or ARM hardware rather than wait for the old SPARCs to grind through it.

I hope you have cheap electic power service where you are - old Suns run warm and use a lot more electricity per cycle than modern processors.

The other way: emulation on modern power-efficient hardware, e.g., with qemu.

	Erik

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Kevin Bowling]

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On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 1:13 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>
> -Henry
>

The sun-rescue list has some 4.x traffic.
http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org

There are some discord communities that are fairly active

SGI discord:
https://discord.gg/bYbWBEFcG2 (has active channels for other companies)

Sun discord:
https://discord.gg/NwBMkfGD

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 16:49, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 1:13 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>
> The sun-rescue list has some 4.x traffic.
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
>
> There are some discord communities that are fairly active
>
> SGI discord:
> https://discord.gg/bYbWBEFcG2 (has active channels for other companies)
>
> Sun discord:
> https://discord.gg/NwBMkfGD
>

Thank you, I just subscribed to sun-rescue.  I have greybeard syndrome
about Discord - I just don't trust that it's going to be a useful resource.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Will Senn]

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On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 
> 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and 
> supporting a modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't 
> really the right place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere 
> that is?  I've made significant progress in some areas and spent a lot 
> of cycles to get there - for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running 
> - so I'd like to contribute to a community if one exists.  Is there a 
> modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>
> -Henry
Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...

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)... 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). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I 
thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM, 
turns out things have come a long way on that front:

https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/

OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could 
just remember how commands work on SunOS :).

Will

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>
> -Henry
>
> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>
> 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)... 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). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>
> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>
> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
> just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>

Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in
https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another resource
about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup to QEMU,
especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image since I am
using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running these things on
the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
you want.  Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
it just works.  I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:

> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a SCSI
> emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
> used to work.
>
> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
> needed.
> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc.    I have all
> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
> trying to make some progress.
>
> Earl
>
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>
>> 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)... 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). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>
>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>
>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
>> just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>
>
> Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in
> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup
> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>
> -Henry
>
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this
fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2:

## power up the machine:
##
# uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when
# tmesh starts:
#
command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10
command mainbus0 power up

Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD
running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure
it still works.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:

> I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit
> quirky.  And the package had lost most of it’s support.
> (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected it…)
>
> I have the install manual for 3.5 (
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_for_the_Sun_Workstation_198711.pdf
> )
> And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )
> And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as
> of 2019 they still worked
> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )
>
> That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI
> device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc.   Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi
> SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use
> a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card).  I do have an
> image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional
> drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….
>
> If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all
> the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so
> nobody has to go thru this again :-)
>
> Earl
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
> you want.  Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
> it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
> it just works.  I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
> sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.
>
> -Henry
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:
>
>> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a
>> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
>> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
>> used to work.
>>
>> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
>> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
>> needed.
>> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc.    I have all
>> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
>> trying to make some progress.
>>
>> Earl
>>
>>
>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
>>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>>> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
>>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>>> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>>
>>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>>
>>> 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)... 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). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>>
>>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>>
>>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
>>> just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in
>> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
>> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup
>> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
>> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
>> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>>
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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I don't know about the PiSCSI in particular.  For the SCSI2SD, if you have
the drive properly defined in the controller you can just use dd to write
the image to the SD card at the offset where the drive is defined.  If the
drive is the first thing on the card, dd if=image of=drive conv=notrunc
will do what you want.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:12, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:

> I’ll have to see about pulling stuff out this weekend and maybe move
> forward.
>
> Still am missing one part — how to get an external SCSI emulator to the
> point where I can get a disk image to it.
>
> Is there a way to move the disk created in TME onto an emulator??   (BTW,
> I’ll probably be using the PiSCSI for this, since I want to have multiple
> images out there, as well as a SD drive so I don’t chance losing stuff
> after getting it all set up.
>
> Earl
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 6:09 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this
> fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2:
>
> ## power up the machine:
> ##
> # uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when
> # tmesh starts:
> #
> command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10
> command mainbus0 power up
>
> Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD
> running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure
> it still works.
>
> -Henry
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:
>
>> I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit
>> quirky.  And the package had lost most of it’s support.
>> (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected
>> it…)
>>
>> I have the install manual for 3.5 (
>> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_for_the_Sun_Workstation_198711.pdf
>> )
>> And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )
>> And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as
>> of 2019 they still worked
>> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )
>>
>> That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI
>> device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc.   Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi
>> SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use
>> a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card).  I do have an
>> image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional
>> drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….
>>
>> If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all
>> the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so
>> nobody has to go thru this again :-)
>>
>> Earl
>>
>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
>> you want.  Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
>> it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
>> it just works.  I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
>> sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a
>>> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
>>> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
>>> used to work.
>>>
>>> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
>>> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
>>> needed.
>>> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc.    I have all
>>> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
>>> trying to make some progress.
>>>
>>> Earl
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation
>>>> 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>>>> modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>>>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
>>>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>>>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>>>> to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>>>
>>>> -Henry
>>>>
>>>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>>>
>>>> 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)... 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). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>>>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>>>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>>>
>>>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>>>
>>>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I
>>>> could just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in
>>> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
>>> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup
>>> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
>>> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
>>> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Alexis]

Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you, I just subscribed to sun-rescue.  I have greybeard 
> syndrome
> about Discord - I just don't trust that it's going to be a 
> useful resource.

i'm dismayed by the extent to which so many IT communities have 
moved to Discord[a] for documentation and tribal knowledge:

"Discord, or the Death of Lore"
-- http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509

"Why you shouldn't trust Discord"
-- 
   https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-discord


Alexis.

[a] As distinct from _Discourse_, which i generally like as a 
discussion/forum platform, and which i wish more IT communities 
were using instead of Discord.

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 19:29 Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> wrote:

> Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Thank you, I just subscribed to sun-rescue.  I have greybeard
> > syndrome
> > about Discord - I just don't trust that it's going to be a
> > useful resource.
>
> i'm dismayed by the extent to which so many IT communities have
> moved to Discord[a] for documentation and tribal knowledge:


Perhaps I should elaborate. The communities I came of age with were Usenet
and mailing lists. While not perfect, they were the (almost) universally
recognized central repositories of group knowledge, especially if you did
not want to pay for support from a manufacturer.

Now, I find that there is a fragmentation happening. There are those of us
who still cling to mailing lists - like this one! - and those who are
willing to navigate the realms of increasingly compartmentalized other
forms of community, Discord included. The fact that there is not a
recognized central repository of unpaid support for a product, like
sun-managers, I find to be frustrating.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Alan Coopersmith]

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

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Alexis]

Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> writes:

> Now, I find that there is a fragmentation happening. There are 
> those
> of us
> who still cling to mailing lists - like this one! - and those 
> who
> are
> willing to navigate the realms of increasingly compartmentalized
> other
> forms of community, Discord included. The fact that there is not 
> a
> recognized central repository of unpaid support for a product, 
> like
> sun-managers, I find to be frustrating.

i basically agree. i won't dwell on this too much further because 
i
recognise that i'm going off-topic, list-wise, but:

i think part of the problem is related to different people having
different preferences around the interfaces they want/need for
discussions. What's happened is that - for reasons i feel are
typically due to a lock-in-oriented business model - many 
discussion
systems don't provide different interfaces/'views' to the same
underlying discussions. Which results in one community on platform 
X,
another community on platform Y, another community on platform Z
.... Whereas, for example, the 'Rocksolid Light' BBS/forum 
software
provides a Web-based interface to an underlying NNTP-based system,
such that people can use their NNTP clients to engage in forum
discussions. i wish this sort of approach was more common.


Alexis.

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Wednesday, March 13th, 2024 at 5:40 PM, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com> wrote:

> The Tribblix distro of illumos offers a choice of
> Xfce, Mate, OpenCDE, or Enlightenment on top of the same core OS derived from
> OpenSolaris.
> 
> --
> -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
> Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris

Of the illumos distros I've tried the past few years, Tribblix felt quite concise and easy to get started with, and ran leaner than the others I tried.  Peter Tribble was also quite quick to respond when I had some questions about a few things.  I'd recommend it to folks who do want to give things a spin in that realm, but I've stepped outside the x86 stream these days to aarch64.  Still, if you're running an x86 type CPU or SPARC, might be worth a spin!

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 11:44:45AM +1100, Alexis wrote:
> 
> i basically agree. i won't dwell on this too much further because i
> recognise that i'm going off-topic, list-wise, but:
> 
> i think part of the problem is related to different people having
> different preferences around the interfaces they want/need for
> discussions. What's happened is that - for reasons i feel are
> typically due to a lock-in-oriented business model - many discussion
> systems don't provide different interfaces/'views' to the same
> underlying discussions. Which results in one community on platform X,
> another community on platform Y, another community on platform Z
> .... Whereas, for example, the 'Rocksolid Light' BBS/forum software
> provides a Web-based interface to an underlying NNTP-based system,
> such that people can use their NNTP clients to engage in forum
> discussions. i wish this sort of approach was more common.

This is a bit off-topic, and so if we need to push this to a different
list (I'm not sure COFF is much better?), let's do so --- but this is
a conversation which is super-improtant to have.  If not just for Unix
heritage, but for the heritage of other collecvtive systems-related
projects, whether they be open source or proprietary.

A few weeks ago, there were people who showed up on the git mailing
list requesting that discussion of the git system move from the
mailing list to using a "forge" web-based system, such as github or
gitlab.  Their reason was that there were tons of people who think
e-mail is so 1970's, and that if we wanted to be more welcoming to the
up-and-coming programmers, we should meet them were they were at.  The
obvious observations of how github was proprietary, and locking up our
history there might be contra-indicated was made, and the problem with
gitlab is that it doesn't have a good e-mail gateway, and while we
might be disenfranchising the young'uns by not using some new-fangled
web interface, disenfranchising the existing base of expertise was
even worse idea.

The best that we have today is lore.kernel.org, which is used by both
the Linux Kernel and the git development communities.  It uses
public-inbox to archive the mailing list traffic, and it can be
accessed via threaded e-mail interface, as well as via NNTP.  There
are also tools for subscribing to messages that match a filtering
criteria, as well as tools for extracting patches plus code review
sign-offs into a form that can be easily consumed by git.

Of course none of this is a substitute for hiring a technical writer
working with keye developers to create architecture documentation so
that when a key developer retires (or gets hit by a bus) that critical
knowledge doesn't get lost.  This requires real investment, and while
some communities might have a large corporate-funded foundation who
might be able to fund that sort of thing, one of the things we've
found is that there are real limits to the sort of documentation work
that can be done by volunteers.  (For example, right now the Linux
kernel documentation maintainer is also the owner and editor for the
Linux Weekly News, and Jon is keenly aware of the limits of what he
can do in his copious spare time.  And none of us is getting any
younger....)

So it's a real problem, and I think it's one that needs a lot more
conversation, both within various open source projects, and perhaps
between different projects to exchange some techniques for better
preserving lore.  After all, it would be great if we could make things
easier for the next generation's *-Heritage-Society.  :-)

							- Ted

[TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[Earl Baugh]

Another reason why it’s fun use the older OS’s.   For old Sun HW, I don’t believe SunView can be beat.
It was always very performant for me, and met the basic goals of a window manager that I needed.
(I’m not one that needs a huge amount of customization..)

Earl

> On Mar 13, 2024, at 8:40 PM, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>