[PLUG] It's Springtime, so Companies are Migrating

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Thu May 19 18:16:49 UTC 2005


On 5/19/05 10:47 AM, Geoff Burling wrote:

> First, a pedantic point about your terminology: SunOS & Solaris are
> two different flavors of UNIX. SunOS is a BSD-based flavor that Sun used
> to offer, but stopped selling it about 10 years ago; I suspect that they
> stopped supporting it at least 5 years ago. Solaris is a SysVr4-based
> flavor, & is what Sun currently sells & supports.

Yes and no. SunOS and Solaris are marketing terms for somewhat, but 
entirely, dissimilar Unix products. The SunOS product line ended with 
version 4.1.3. I still have login rights to SPARC running it:

$ uname -sr
SunOS 4.1.3_U1

The Solaris product line picked up where SunOS left off and became 
"SunOS 5." Hence the odd uname report on a Solaris 9 system:

$ uname -sr
SunOS 5.9

This isn't merely semantics. Many (most? all?) binaries compiled on a 
SunOS 4 box will run unmodified under Solaris.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com



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