Subj : Hello?
To   : William McBrine
From : Lawrence Garvin
Date : Sat Oct 21 2000 07:13 am

William McBrine said in a message to Lawrence Garvin:

-=> 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".

 WM> It's the direct successor to 2.6, but "7" is its official version
 WM> number, AFAIK. The full story is more complicated -- the old SunOs
 WM> got up to, what, 4.x? -- and then, when Solaris 2.x came out (there
 WM> never _was_ a Solaris 1.x; earlier versions of SunOS were
 WM> considered to be the 1.x), it was _also_ SunOS 5.x. That is, if you
 WM> did a "uname -a" on a Solaris 2.6 system, it reported itself as
 WM> SunOS 5.6. I think the technical distinction was that "SunOS" was
 WM> the kernel, while "Solaris" was the whole operating environment,
 WM> but I'm not sure.

You are correct. Solaris 1.x was the GUI on top of SunOS 4.1.3; Solaris 2.x was 
the GUI on top of SunOS 5.x. During the period of SunOS 4.x you could by either 
"SunOS" (sans GUI) or Solaris 1.x (with GUI). With Solaris 2.x you could only 
buy "Solaris" and simply choose not to install the GUI if you needed only the 
"SunOS" portion.

 WM> Anyway, I haven't seen Solaris 7 (or 8) in person, but my guess is 
 WM> that they're trying to reconcile the two numbers, and rationalize 
 WM> the system, so that Solaris 7 = SunOS 7.

Perhaps William. I'm not sure of the rationale either and I've never seen Sun 
offer up any descriptions. There was a Solaris 2.6 product released in '97, but 
from what I heard (I never actually installed it, though we did purchase the 
upgrade from Solaris 2.5) it was riddled with bugs.

Next thing I knew Sun was offering "Solaris 7" as a free single-user package 
and I jumped on it.

 WM> There might also be an element of rivalry with Linux, where many
 WM> distros are at 6.x or 7.x (though the kernel is just into 2.4.x).

Except that, as mentioned previously, "Solaris 7" was released when Slackware 
was still at version 3.x.

 WM> In fact, Slackware had its number artifically bumped up from around
 WM> 4.x to 7.x for just this reason. Silly, but there it is.

Artificial faith established by higher numbers... so I should feel really 
really good about my HP-UX v11.0 ??? :-)

So what we're saying is that exactly the opposite is true... it wasn't Sun that 
bumped the Solaris numbers to compete.. but perhaps Slackware that bumped 
there's to compete with Solaris 7, Unixware 7, OpenServer 5, AIX 3, HP-UX 9 (I 
think, at the time)... ???


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