Re: "MIT/GNU/Linux"

[Tim X]

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:

> On Sat, 30 Dec 2006 11:28:50 +1100, Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>>Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:
>>> First of all, there are other examples where "parts" have a different
>>> name from the "whole".  Consider for example the fine difference
>>> between "SunOS" and "The Solaris Operating Environment" :)
>>
>> Can you expand on this point?
>
> "Solaris" is considered to be the "SunOS" operating system, plus a
> graphical user environment, and a few other components.
>
>> I'm asking as this seems to contradict what I was told by Sun and
>> other sys admins and recall reading some years ago. My understanding
>> is that sunOS was what Sun called the operating system they had prior
>> to Solaris.
>
> "SunOS" 4.X was BSD-based.  Sun replaced the BSD-based core of the
> system with a System V derivative, creating SunOS release 5.0.  At the
> same time, a new marketing name was introduced for SunOS 5.0 and it
> accompanying set of components.  This name was "Solaris 2".
>
>> When they brought out Solaris, they faced a bit of industry resistance
>> and released SunOS (I can't remember, but think it might have been
>> v4.5 or v5.4 or something like that), which was essentially the same
>> as solaris (v2.3?).
>
> There is a nice table of Solaris vs. SunOS versions here:
>
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Operating_System
>
> I can't verify the correctness of *all* these release versions, but it
> may help a bit.
>

Thanks. Its always worth getting clarification on this sort of stuff.
I didn't have to administer a solaris system for very long and I
didn't like it very much at the time (I was more experienced with
OSF/Digital Unix). This was solaris 2.4 I think and it had a few
issues - the sendmail bundled with it was buggy, there were problems
with defunct processes hanging around forever and a few other
irritating but not critical problems. 

What was really interesting was I replaced solaris with one of the
early Linux sparc ports and was very amazed at the performance/speed
improvement we got. I had thought the sparc hardware was over priced
and slow, but once we had GNU linux on it, it was merely over priced.
It actually gave us a really solid and reliable server for quite some
time. The people I was working for were really amazed at the uptime we
got and the performance. I was happy because I was able to install
emacs on it (I had problems getting emacs installed under solaris, I
can't remember what the exact problem was, but I had to tweak the
build to get it to compile and then it segfaulted quite often). I
think it did have xemacs installed, but one of the key elisp packages
I needed wouldn't run under xemacs, so it was no good to me. 

This is why Ive stuck with GNU Emacs rather than Xemacs - some of the
packages I use the most just won't run under Xemacs because of font
lock differences.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au