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Andre
15 comments
Jyrgen N

@PCOWandre @schratze Aaaaaaah nooooooo!

Since that job where our main box was a uVAX II with 4.3 *and source code* (which was rare at the time) I have been an ardent BSD fan.

21 Nov 2023 at 12:35 | Open on mas.to
Andre

@jyrgenn @schratze Aah, too many years in the Sun for me.

21 Nov 2023 at 13:07 | Open on jauntygoat.net
Jyrgen N

@PCOWandre @schratze Oh, we had SunOS 4, too. 🤣

21 Nov 2023 at 15:15 | Open on mas.to
Jyrgen N

@PCOWandre @schratze Actually, working at WeMoveMobileData and later WeHostMillions I learned to like Solaris 10 a lot. Which was rather unlike the SysV I got to know at the University earlier in its different forms of not being very satisfactory.

21 Nov 2023 at 15:20 | Open on mas.to
Andre

@jyrgenn @schratze I think years of earlier Solaris conditioned me a little. When I had a retro trip to Dell UNIX et al, the userland was familiar and I had no trouble building packages.

21 Nov 2023 at 23:31 | Open on jauntygoat.net
Jyrgen N

@PCOWandre @schratze Never heard of Dell Unix — what was that?

22 Nov 2023 at 8:37 | Open on mas.to
Andre

@jyrgenn @schratze Circa 1990-1992 SVR4 UNIX. Was near unobtainium at the time of release; certainly never found it in Australia.

If you look at some early comparisons of UNIX options on x86, it'll turn up, often with a pretty strong recommendation.

Caveats? The hardware support is pretty narrow. Only a couple of supported NICs; I never managed to get the Adaptec SCSI HBA support working and it doesn't know about large storage.

My plan was to attempt to port some of the NIC drivers from early Solaris x86 but my development box kept shitting itself -- failed power supply then failed motherboard then failed disk then failed NIC. At some point I'll find another reasonable fast-486/early pentium and give it another poke.

@jyrgenn @schratze Circa 1990-1992 SVR4 UNIX. Was near unobtainium at the time of release; certainly never found it in Australia.

If you look at some early comparisons of UNIX options on x86, it'll turn up, often with a pretty strong recommendation.

Caveats? The hardware support is pretty narrow. Only a couple of supported NICs; I never managed to get the Adaptec SCSI HBA support working and it doesn't know about large storage.

22 Nov 2023 at 8:43 | Open on jauntygoat.net
Resuna

@PCOWandre @jyrgenn @schratze Porting drivers from early Solaris to SVR4? Would that even be possible? Wasn't early Solaris basically SunOS (BSD) under the hood?

22 Nov 2023 at 11:19 | Open on ohai.social
schratze replied to Resuna
Andre replied to Resuna

@resuna @jyrgenn Nope. Solaris -- as in Solaris proper, not the "Solaris 1" backported name for SunOS 4 -- was STREAMS and System V all the way.

With proper API/ABI definitions and compatibility. Look at some of the classic LSI drivers -- one binary covers 2.6 through 10 and the cut at 2.6 is only because of the jump to 64 bit splitting the driver tree.

22 Nov 2023 at 11:41 | Open on jauntygoat.net
Jyrgen N replied to Andre

@PCOWandre @resuna It was indeed SunOS up to 4 that was BSD-based, AFAIK from the start. (4.0.3 when I finally got access to the coveted Suns at the university, work as well as study. At my student job I got the task to install "all that GNU software" on the first SPARCstation 1 they bought — a night and a day of pure fun. No "./configure && make install", rather real configuration work at the time. The best thing: Emacs with native SunView support.)

22 Nov 2023 at 12:34 | Open on mas.to
Jyrgen N replied to Jyrgen

@PCOWandre @resuna Compiling gcc three times and things. The only 25-hour shift I ever did.

22 Nov 2023 at 12:36 | Open on mas.to
Resuna replied to Andre

@PCOWandre @jyrgenn OK. Work quit using Sun about then so I have little experience with Sun post SunOS.

22 Nov 2023 at 15:05 | Open on ohai.social
Jyrgen N

@PCOWandre @schratze To clarify, the SysV I got to know earlier wasn't beyond SVR3; I never saw a non-Solaris SVR4. The ones I worked with a bit more were ISC 386ix (rather classic), IBM AIX (really weird for its own reasons), and HP-UX, which at least was significantly less annoying once it reached version 10.

22 Nov 2023 at 12:08 | Open on mas.to
Andre

@jyrgenn I've been tempted at times to find an Amiga just to run that port of SysV...

22 Nov 2023 at 12:13 | Open on jauntygoat.net
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