[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Kevin Bowling]

What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical

Me:
1) FreeBSD - I find it to generally be the least annoying desktop and
laptop experience with admittedly careful selection of hardware to
ensure compatibility.  It's ideal to me for commercial appliances and
servers due to the license, tight coupling of kernel and base, and
features like ZFS, jails, and pluggable TCP stacks.  Linux distros
lost their luster for me once systemd was integrated into Debian, and
that kind of culture seems to be prevailing up and down the stack in a
way that I'd prefer to be an outside observer of Linux and not
dependent on it for now.

2) AIX - I often see people disparage AIX but I like it.  I learned a
lot in my teens about C, build systems, compilers, and lots of
libraries trying to port random software to it for auto-didactic
reasons.  It definitely doesn't feel like any other UNIX.  It probably
supports high core count and NUMA better than any other system except
Linux, it had advanced virtualization with LPARs and containers with
WPARs before most and hot patchable kernel, fully pagable kernel, lots
of rigorous kernel engineering there that didn't get a lot of fanfare.
SMIT is kind of cool as a TUI and spits out commands that you can
learn through repetition and use at the CLI or scripting.  I think it
probably peaked in the early 2000s, but the memory management, volume
management, and file systems all seemed pretty forward thinking up
until then.  I don't think SMP performance was a strong suite until it
was pretty much a relegated niche though.

3) IRIX - it just screams '90s cool like an acrylic sweater.  Soft
real time, immense graphics support, pro audio and video features,
lots of interesting commercial software, NUMA, supercomputers.  I
enjoy tinkering on this still, but a lot of that is due to the neat
hardware.

Regards,
Kevin

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
> 1) Free
> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
> 3) Historical

SunOS 4.1.3  Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based
on that.  If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel.  It's BSD
for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system,
a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about
the right picture.  And all the bugs fixed.

I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases.  They all sucked in
comparison.  Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me
but Solaris sucked.  Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they
did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked
on it get that.  Or not, it was never home for me.

SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it.  And I
can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob,
Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture
that they left for me to see.

Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think
he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door
to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm.  Pope or I would go down and let him
in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming
about why haven't they fixed this bug?  And he'd just fix it.  He didn't
work here and he fixed bugs.  I get it, it took me years after I left 
Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun.

The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make
it better, was over the top.  And it was because of the super stars who
showed us what an OS could be.

Today?  Favorite?   Grumble.  It's sort of shitty.  Linux is the obvious
winner but is it what I like?  It's what I run.  Have to give it credit.
It is pretty good.  I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS.

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Kevin Bowling]

I have the requisite hardware and media so I will give it a shake so I
can talk with you about it some time.

Auspex.. I have a story there believe it or not.  Tore one apart at an
electronic junkyard I worked at part time in my teens.  But I got it
booted up enough to test everything and sell as they wanted.  The
hardware was very cool.  I didn't know enough back then to evaluate
the software.  I murdered a ton of interesting computers there sadly.
Still searching for salvation :D

Regards,

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 8:28 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
>> 1) Free
>> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
>> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
>> 3) Historical
>
> SunOS 4.1.3  Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based
> on that.  If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel.  It's BSD
> for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system,
> a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about
> the right picture.  And all the bugs fixed.
>
> I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases.  They all sucked in
> comparison.  Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me
> but Solaris sucked.  Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they
> did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked
> on it get that.  Or not, it was never home for me.
>
> SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it.  And I
> can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob,
> Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture
> that they left for me to see.
>
> Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think
> he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door
> to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm.  Pope or I would go down and let him
> in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming
> about why haven't they fixed this bug?  And he'd just fix it.  He didn't
> work here and he fixed bugs.  I get it, it took me years after I left
> Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun.
>
> The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make
> it better, was over the top.  And it was because of the super stars who
> showed us what an OS could be.
>
> Today?  Favorite?   Grumble.  It's sort of shitty.  Linux is the obvious
> winner but is it what I like?  It's what I run.  Have to give it credit.
> It is pretty good.  I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS.

Re: [TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Mutiny]

'From: Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>Sent: Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:59:27I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases.  They all sucked incomparison.  Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at mebut Solaris sucked.  ...'As far as I remember Sunos-4 Kernel became AT&T Sys5r4 kernel and made it into Sunos5 which became Solaris.
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[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Arthur Krewat]

Isn't this a rehash of my recent thread? :)

On 9/28/2017 11:28 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> SunOS 4.1.3
Historically, yes. I was forced kicking and screaming into Solaris back 
in the 90's, because all the CAD/CAM software I administered moved to 
Solaris, while Sun themselves moved to Solaris on their new SMP systems 
like the SparcServer-1000 and even the 670 was more useful with Solaris.

Currently? Solaris - it's NEVER let me down in commercial or personal 
use. Sure, I hit a bug or two here or there, maybe a controller that it 
didn't like, but running PeopleSoft on it, Oracle database, whatever 
else I specialize in, it's been great.

Like I said, I was forced kicking and screaming into Solaris - however, 
once I got used to it, and having used SVR4.2 for a home BBS/USENET/UUCP 
system modem front-end in the early 90's, I quickly grew to like it.

NUMA? Solaris does it very well, probably because of the huge SPARC 
systems carrying over to the Intel world.

I used to run FreeBSD at home, for firewall, and general file server 
usage. Why? Because I was in love with SunOS at the time ;)

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

> As far as I remember Sunos-4 Kernel became AT&T Sys5r4 kernel and
> made it into Sunos5 which became Solaris.

Nope, Sun got SVR4 dumped on them and then we moved some of the stuff 
from SunOS over.  But a lot, most of it, got dropped.  They are entirely
different kernels.

Don't get me wrong, there is some good stuff in Solaris, but I never
loved it.  I loved the SunOS kernel.

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
> 1) Free
> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
> 3) Historical

Compared to many here, I'm barely a beginner, I'm in my 40s, got my
intorduction to Unix in the early 90s with SunOS 4.something while in
college.

1) Free:
I was then introduced to Linux by a friend of mine, back in the
pre-Slackware days even, some 0.9x kernel.  The first kernel I compiled
myself was 0.96.

Like Larry said, Linux is mostly what I use as my desktop Linux.  It
works well enough on my Thinkpad.  I run NetBSD on my VPS for bl.org,
and I do prefer working in NetBSD, just that trying to get 'Desktop'
like work done on it is harder, as these days, it's all developed on
Linux and ported to others.

2) Commercial platform
In the 90s, it was SunOS 4, though I actually started to like working
in Solaris around 2.5.1.  It started to stabilize and the jobs I was
working at started buying hardware that would run it well.  (Solaris
2.4 on SS1 and SS2 was not fun).  I've not had a lot of experience with
other commercial offerings.  While I was with IBM, I was exposed to AIX
(of course), other jobs had HP/UX, and I even logged into an IRIX box
once, though that was in a DC across the country from me and was used as
a fileserver.

Since Oracle bought Sun, I've given up on Solaris, which really doesn't
leave many options for Commercial Unixy platforms.  I do use an iMac at
home and a MacBook Pro for work, but even there, I spend most of my time
in xterms spawned form XQuartz logged into remote Linux systems.

3) Historical
I like playing with historical systems.  I've recently started playing
with Amiga UNIX (Commodore's port of SysVr4 to 68030) under FS-UAE.
Maybe someday I'll get it running on the Amiga 3000 that is currently
gathering dust.  I also have a Mac Quardra 950 out in the garage that
some day I want to get A/UX running on.  Then there is the HP 9000
715/80 and the RISC NextSTEP media waiting for some round tuits.  I've
recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under qemu-sparc
that I want to try as well.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ

Favorite UNIX

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:

> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.

Can you share a pointer to those with us?

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

Favorite UNIX

[Michael Parson]

On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
> 
>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
> 
> Can you share a pointer to those with us?

Sure:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4

Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ

Favorite UNIX

[Arthur Krewat]

Good stuff, I gotta try this. That Wiki reminded me that for the longest 
time, I was running "xv" on Solaris only because of the compatibility 
package for SunOS. I don't think I ever compiled it natively for Solaris.



On 9/30/2017 2:34 PM, Michael Parson wrote:
>
> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
>>
>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
>>
>> Can you share a pointer to those with us?
>
> Sure:
>
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
>
> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
>

Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 01:34:14PM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> 
> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> >On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
> >
> >>I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
> >>qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
> >
> >Can you share a pointer to those with us?
> 
> Sure:
> 
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
> 
> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)

If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot
of Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of
late night hacking by people who cared).

Favorite UNIX

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:

> If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot 
> of Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of 
> late night hacking by people who cared).

Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS.  Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS 
decided to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications 
were).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 11:51:30AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> >If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot of
> >Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of late
> >night hacking by people who cared).
> 
> Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS.  Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS decided
> to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications were).

I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
scale on multiprocessors.  So it might be worth a look.

Yeah, at that time everyone was pushed to Solaris.  Here's another Larry
story for ya.

I created this weird ass NFS server that was a cluster.  I sort of
cheated but sort of did not.  It ran really fast, it used one of the
first ethernet switches (a modified Kalpana, the mods were VLANs, I
thought I invented that but apparently somebody beat me to it).  I did
the development on my beloved SunOS 4.x but Scooter insisted that it
ship with Solaris.

So I'm at the Moscone center, some tech/geek thing, I'm pitching this
product.  It was a technical pitch, I'm an engineer, so it was mostly
geeks in the room.

There is some dude in the room who keeps railing on Solaris.  I'm trying
to be a good soldier and say that Solaris is the future, yada yada.
This guy keeps going on and on about how much Solaris sucks and couldn't
he have this system with SunOS.

I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
Solaris".

It was all captured on tape.  My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server hardware
at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it".  So I did.

Fun times?  I guess?  Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
the geeks want.  When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that often.

--lm

Favorite UNIX

[Cory Smelosky]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2017, at 18:10, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 11:51:30AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > 
> > >If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot of
> > >Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of late
> > >night hacking by people who cared).
> > 
> > Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS.  Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS decided
> > to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications were).
> 
> I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
> scale on multiprocessors.  So it might be worth a look.
> 

I have source for 4.1.4 scurried away...but I don't think I have 4.1.3.

> Yeah, at that time everyone was pushed to Solaris.  Here's another Larry
> story for ya.
> 
> I created this weird ass NFS server that was a cluster.  I sort of
> cheated but sort of did not.  It ran really fast, it used one of the
> first ethernet switches (a modified Kalpana, the mods were VLANs, I
> thought I invented that but apparently somebody beat me to it).  I did
> the development on my beloved SunOS 4.x but Scooter insisted that it
> ship with Solaris.

How'd you do VLANs on that?

> 
> So I'm at the Moscone center, some tech/geek thing, I'm pitching this
> product.  It was a technical pitch, I'm an engineer, so it was mostly
> geeks in the room.
> 
> There is some dude in the room who keeps railing on Solaris.  I'm trying
> to be a good soldier and say that Solaris is the future, yada yada.
> This guy keeps going on and on about how much Solaris sucks and couldn't
> he have this system with SunOS.

I'd love to run SunOS on modern hardware...;)

I need to fix my IPX/IPC...

> 
> I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
> sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
> Solaris".
> 
> It was all captured on tape.  My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server
> hardware
> at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it".  So I did.
> 
> Fun times?  I guess?  Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
> the geeks want.  When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that
> often.
> 
> --lm


-- 
  Cory Smelosky
  b4 at gewt.net

Favorite UNIX

[Michael Parson]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Michael Parson wrote:
> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
>> 
>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
>> 
>> Can you share a pointer to those with us?
>
> Sure:
>
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
>
> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)

Found some more info about qemu-system-sparc, turns out, you don't even
need an 'ss5.bin' file, and CG3 graphics seem to work.  Aparently the
built-in stuff works well enough to boot and install the OS.

I'm using a real SS5 rom image and -vga cg3 to have a graphical head.

Now to see if I can find any pre-compiled software archives anywhere.

I tried NextStep too.  The media boots, but it eventually hangs and
never lets me install.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ

Favorite UNIX

[Kevin Bowling]

This one is kind of wild, it emulates a SparcStation 5 on an FPGA
http://temlib.org.  The screenshots show SunOS 4.1.4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYL42WQfgGI

On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 8:05 PM, Michael Parson <mparson at bl.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Michael Parson wrote:
>>
>> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
>>>
>>>
>>> Can you share a pointer to those with us?
>>
>>
>> Sure:
>>
>> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
>>
>> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
>
>
> Found some more info about qemu-system-sparc, turns out, you don't even
> need an 'ss5.bin' file, and CG3 graphics seem to work.  Aparently the
> built-in stuff works well enough to boot and install the OS.
>
> I'm using a real SS5 rom image and -vga cg3 to have a graphical head.
>
> Now to see if I can find any pre-compiled software archives anywhere.
>
> I tried NextStep too.  The media boots, but it eventually hangs and
> never lets me install.
>
>
> --
> Michael Parson
> Pflugerville, TX
> KF5LGQ

Favorite UNIX

[Arthur Krewat]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 857 bytes --]

On 9/30/2017 9:10 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
> scale on multiprocessors.  So it might be worth a look.
>
>
This? From 4.1.4:

/*      @(#)vm_mp.c     1.1     94/10/31        */

/*
  * Copyright (c) 1986 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
  */

/*
  * VM - multiprocessor/ing support.
  *
  * Currently the kmon_enter() / kmon_exit() pair implements a
  * simple monitor for objects protected by the appropriate lock.
  * The kcv_wait() / kcv_broadcast pait implements a simple
  * condition variable which can be used for `sleeping'
  * and `waking' inside a monitor if some resource is
  * is needed which is not available.
  *
  * XXX - this code is written knowing about the semantics
  * of sleep/wakeup and UNIX scheduling on a uniprocessor machine.
  */

Favorite UNIX

[Don Hopkins]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3737 bytes --]


> I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
> sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
> Solaris".
> 
> It was all captured on tape.  My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server hardware
> at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it".  So I did.
> 
> Fun times?  I guess?  Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
> the geeks want.  When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that often.
> 
> --lm

Solaris: so bad I left the company.

Hey does anybody remember what ever happened to Steve MacKay? 

(I don’t mean what I did to him, because I remember that, just what happened to him afterwards! ;-) 

-Don

The Worst Job in the World

Subject: The Worst Job in the World 
From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>

I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell.
Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory, except that none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a successful test in the field.

But I don't want to tell you about biological warfare, I want to tell you about what makes my friend's job so terrible. First, some context.

The training for Unix system administration is a frightening process. When machines start dying, users start screaming, and everything grinds to a halt, the novice feels the cold fingers of terror clutching about his heart.

 
    #!/bin/sh
    # this doesn't work, but no time to fix it -- hope nothing crashes
    progname=$0
 

But if one stays the course, one might some day achieve the dubious satisfaction of being able to mutter "at least I know why it broke!".
 
    #!/bin/sh
    # This works...I wonder if it will get me laid
    progname="`echo $0 | sed 's:^\./\./:\./:'`"
 

But there are many who must dwell in this miasma both day and night. What makes my friend's job so ugly is that he doesn't only work with just any strain of Unix -- he works with Solaris. And he doesn't just deal with just any braindead users -- his users are the executives at Sun Microsystems.
Let me tell you about Sun Microsystems. At Sun, there's a long history of executives playing pranks on one another. For April Fools, these rowdies would play tricks like putting a golf course (complete with putting green) in Scott McNealy's office, or floating Bill Joy's Ferrari in one of the landscaped ponds. Things have come a long way since then. Now every day is April Fools, and my friend doesn't like it one bit.

VP: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"

Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."

VP: "Get it off of my machine at once!"

Admin: "But sir, Ed Zander told me that you should be running Solaris now."

VP: "Zander, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"

Admin: "No sir."

VP: "Why not?"

Admin: "If he ran Solaris, he wouldn't be able to get any work done."

VP: "Very well, restore my machine to SunOS, and put this Solaris crap on Zander's machine."

Admin: "But sir..."

VP: "That's an order! And tell him Scott gave you the directive himself!"

Admin: "Yes, sir."

Zander: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"
Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."

Zander: "Get it off of my machine at once!"

Admin: "But sir, Scott McNealy told me that you should be running Solaris now."

Zander: "McNealy, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"

...

The only thing worse that being a Unix system administrator is doing the job for ungrateful users.

[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Michael Kerpan]

On Sep 28, 2017 11:02 PM, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:

What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical

1. FreeBSD is best of breed, these days. It's logical, stuff tends to just
work, and it just feels right.

2. I don't have much experience with modern commercial Unix. A few of my
friends really like macOS (formerly OS X, nee NeXTSTEP), but it's
artificially locked to Apple hardware so I've never really tried it.
Frankly, I do most of my daily computing on Windows, which works fine for
video games, word processing, web browsing, graphics work, and hosting VMs
to run FreeBSD in.

3. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP is still really cool. The kernel is a mess and the
whole PostScript as primary display was less than ideal for graphics
performance, but it was cool and nobody's done a graphical UI as well since.

Mike
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[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Derrik Walker v2.0]

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On 09/28/2017 10:58 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
> 1) Free
> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
> 3) Historical
1) Linux - not the greatest, by far, but it gets the job done and pays 
the bills ( in my case, anyway ). And it still has good long term 
viability, as of 2017, anyway.

2) Solaris - Sun finally got it right starting with Solaris 7, and it 
just got better from there.  I ran it for many, many years on my Home 
Ultra 5.
Really sad to see what Oracle did to it! I use to have boss say that 
Solaris was the UNIX geek's UNIX, he might be right ( altho these days 
that's probably BSD ).

3) Irix - Not the best UNIX, but damn, those workstations it ran on WERE 
the best.  I miss my Indigo R4K/Elan almost as much as I do my Ultra 5 
with Solaris 9 on it!

-- 
-- Derrik

Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
dwalker at doomd.net

"Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak


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[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[George Michaelson]

My favourite remains V7 on a pdp11. Not because of any specious
reductionism, but because it was a dawning experience, and because of
the 'learn' package which I found very good, subsequently stripped
because of licence restrictions. I had the care of one in Leeds uni in
'82 and loved it. Far more than the Norsk Data mini, perhaps less
usefully than the 780s with 4.1 but still. It was a joy.

I freely admit I did next to nothing of substance (maintenance coding
an X.25 comms package for JANET was the high spot, on a compiler with
a very low #define expansion limit which hit us badly) but somehow, it
remains my favourite.

I also admired the ease with which people I knew could do things with
it. 32V was (AFAIK) a logical outcome.

On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Derrik Walker v2.0 <dwalker at doomd.net> wrote:
> On 09/28/2017 10:58 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>>
>> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or
>> more:
>> 1) Free
>> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
>> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
>> 3) Historical
>
> 1) Linux - not the greatest, by far, but it gets the job done and pays the
> bills ( in my case, anyway ). And it still has good long term viability, as
> of 2017, anyway.
>
> 2) Solaris - Sun finally got it right starting with Solaris 7, and it just
> got better from there.  I ran it for many, many years on my Home Ultra 5.
> Really sad to see what Oracle did to it! I use to have boss say that Solaris
> was the UNIX geek's UNIX, he might be right ( altho these days that's
> probably BSD ).
>
> 3) Irix - Not the best UNIX, but damn, those workstations it ran on WERE the
> best.  I miss my Indigo R4K/Elan almost as much as I do my Ultra 5 with
> Solaris 9 on it!
>
> --
> -- Derrik
>
> Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
> dwalker at doomd.net
>
> "Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
>
>

Favorite UNIX

[Michael Parson]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2017 09:13:28 -0600
> Michael Parson <mparson at bl.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
>>>
>>> Can you share a pointer to those with us?
>>
>> Sure:
>>
>> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
>>
>> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
>
> So then the next question is where can one find install media (or
> image thereof...)

I bought a boxed copy of 'Solaris 1.1.2' off e-bay many moon ago,
though I've been told it can be found with the google search term of
'winworldpc'.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ