From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 09:34:49 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] How good a representative of System V is Solaris In-Reply-To: <8dd2d95c0905281000w3ed4b4fdtf3ac8eea439d6234@mail.gmail.com> References: <8dd2d95c0905281000w3ed4b4fdtf3ac8eea439d6234@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <70DB8DDB-FA63-45E3-A91C-BA0FEA0231D9@tfeb.org> 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