Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 04:42:17 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "James A Wilde" <james.wilde@telia.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: OT: Sun OS (Was: BSD Inquiry...) Message-ID: <14749.1273.68656.905286@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <62566756@toto.iv>
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James A Wilde writes: > FreeBSD and Linux are two variants of UNIX. UNIX is generally regarded as > being something of a spectrum of different variants, from BSD at one end, to > which FreeBSD obviously belongs, to Sun OS at the other. Posix, from the > point ov view of an inexperienced user - me - is closer to the Sun OS end of > the spectrum. This basically affects the way the system starts, stops and > changes run level. Run levels don't exist in FreeBSD. Um - the other end is Sys V, or maybe AT&T, not Sun OS. Sun OS has two radically different incarnations. The first version (through Sun OS 4) was very much BSD. Nuts - Bill Joy went from CSRG (the creators of BSD) to Sun for that effort. That version is usually referred to as "Sun OS", and it was still in wide enough use that Sun released Y2K patches for it in the last quarter of '99. The distribution of the windowing system for SunOS was labeled "Solaris", but few people used that name. SunOS - in versions through 4 - was available without Solaris. With SunOS 5.0, Sun did two major things. One as no longer releasing it without Solaris. The other was converting from BSD to SysV (plus some BSD plus some Sun-specific stuff). That SysV version of SunOS is usually referred to as "Solaris", and the Solaris version numbers are used - so what is called "Solaris 2.5.1" includes SunOS 2.5.1. Worse yet, they decided that their weren't going to be any more major upgrades, so they *dropped* the 2. Hence Solaris 8 is Solaris version 2.8, and the underlying OS is Sun OS 5.8 (though I'll confess I haven't got a Solaris 8 box to verify that one on). Linux isn't based on Unix source code. It's a rewrite from scratch based on the SysV manuals. So the flavor is a lot like SysV (or Solaris). On the other hand, there's no centralized source for Linux code outside the kernel, so you never know... <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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