Date: Wed, 6 Nov 96 09:38:50 -0500 From: curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) To: sln@public.jn.sd.cn Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SunOS and Solaris? Message-ID: <9611061438.AA09505@mail.kcwc.com>
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> My question is: What's the difference between Sun's SunOS > and Solaris. SunOS refers to the old BSD version of their OS. Solaris is the new (in the last 2 or 3 years) System V based version of their OS. Solaris is what Sun wants everybody to use. They tried to drop support of the old SunOS versions, but so many customers complained that they decided they would continue supporting SunOS and continue producing new versions of SunOS to support new Sun hardware. But other than hardware support and bug fixes, no new features are being added to SunOS. Note however that if you do a "uname -a" on a Solaris system it's still called SunOS. The name "Solaris" refers to the whole package where as the SunOS name (and versions) refer to the kernel. The SunOS 5.3 kernel is part of Solaris 2.3 (or at least I think that's how the numbers work). The "Solaris" name actually started being used before the switch to the System V based kernel. Solaris 1.X systems (which include the SunOS 4.X kernel) were BSD based. But common usage quickly led people to use the "Solaris" name to refer to versions of the OS that were based on the System V kernel and the SunOS name to refer to the older BSD systems. As far as the differences between BSD and Systems V, that's simple. System V sucks and BSD doesn't. :) Curt Welch curt@kcwc.com
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