Subj : Solaris
To   : William McBrine
From : Lawrence Garvin
Date : Sat Oct 21 2000 07:16 am

William McBrine said in a message to Lawrence Garvin:

-=> Lawrence Garvin wrote to Francois Thunus <=-

 SQ> I HAD kinda wondered "Gee, why'd they leap from 2 to 8 so quickly."

 FT> to play catch up with Slackware ?

 LG> I don't think so, Francois. At the time Slackware was still at v2.3

 WM> Eh? Slackware was at 3.0 back in '96.

Okay.. let's sort this one out...

   I have in my posession, sitting on top of my desk, right in front of my face 
at this very instant in time, the First, Third and Fourth editions of "Linux: 
Configuration and Installation" which was the premier book form of Slackware 
distribution at the time.

   I've not yet cracked the covers today (in fact, I'm not sure I've cracked 
them at all) .. so we're going to study this together.. and I may, in fact, be 
wrong.. but I don't think so, considering when I personally first noticed 
Linux... but here goes...

   First edition shipped with Slackware v2.3 -- that's marked right on the 
cover of the book. The book has a copyright of 1995.

   I don't have the second edition.

   Third edition shipped with Slackware 3.2 -- that's marked right on the cover 
of the book. The book has a copyright of 1997.

   Fourth edition shipped with Slackware 5 -- that's marked right on the cover 
of the book. The book has a copyright of 1998.

   Thus, I will have to concede that Slackware 3.0 shipped sometime between '95 
and '97.. most likely in '96. Somebody with the Second edition could easily 
confirm this, as well as from several other sources, no doubt.

   But... Slackware was -still- at version 3.5 in 1998 when the Solaris 7 
product was released.

 WM> Solaris was still doing its 2.x thing much more recently than 
 WM> that.

Solaris 2.x was available as early as 1994. I know this because we had an 
option between Solaris 1.1 and Solaris 2.x for our HP OpenView Node Manager, 
but the HP OpenView NNM had not been certified for SunOS 5.x at the time, so we 
were stuck with Solaris 1.1.

We bought and installed the Solaris 2.5 (and HP OpenView upgrades) in 1996. And 
the Solaris 2.6 was purchased by my former employer as an upgrade product in 
late 1997, IIRC. I left my employment there in April 1998.

 WM> But I agree that it wasn't Slackware that motivated it, and 
 WM> Francois knows that, too -- because Slackware itself was playing 
 WM> catch-up to Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake (in terms of version 
 WM> numbering only). Hence the joke.

Notwithstanding that RedHat did not exist until sometime after Slackware hit 
version 3.x... correct?

How RedHat got to version 5 before most of us even noticed the product is yet 
another topic of interest, I suppose. I know that was late enough for my 
current employer to have deployed it on a Dual Pentium II 266 with onboard 
Adaptec AIC-7895 chip set.. so it wasn't that far back!

RedHat 6.0 was only recently available, and immediately followed up by RedHat 
v6.1; hopefully to rectify a number of anomolies in /etc/rc.* file linkages 
concerning startup scripts that were actually linked to the shutdown moniker.

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 * Origin: lawrence@fido.eforest.net | The Enchanted Forest (1:106/6018)

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