Subj : Re: Hello?
To   : Lawrence Garvin
From : William McBrine
Date : Tue Oct 17 2000 02:32 pm

-=> Lawrence Garvin wrote to Steve Quarrella <=-

 LG> Wow!.. well -that- explains a lot. I have the "Solaris 7" CDROM that
 LG> got from a free licensing program a couple of years ago (but never
 LG> installed). I had -no- idea it was actually "Solaris 2.7".

It's the direct successor to 2.6, but "7" is its official version number, 
AFAIK. The full story is more complicated -- the old SunOs got up to, what, 
4.x? -- and then, when Solaris 2.x came out (there never _was_ a Solaris 1.x; 
earlier versions of SunOS were considered to be the 1.x), it was _also_ SunOS 
5.x. That is, if you did a "uname -a" on a Solaris 2.6 system, it reported 
itself as SunOS 5.6. I think the technical distinction was that "SunOS" was the 
kernel, while "Solaris" was the whole operating environment, but I'm not sure. 
Anyway, I haven't seen Solaris 7 (or 8) in person, but my guess is that they're 
trying to reconcile the two numbers, and rationalize the system, so that 
Solaris 7 = SunOS 7.

There might also be an element of rivalry with Linux, where many distros are at 
6.x or 7.x (though the kernel is just into 2.4.x). In fact, Slackware had its 
number artifically bumped up from around 4.x to 7.x for just this reason. 
Silly, but there it is.

.... Vote Ralph Nader for President in 2000
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.38
 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000)

.