The Answer Gang

RE Solaris UNIX?

From Mitchell Bruntel

Gee: I have a question, and an answer. I sent the question earlier about LILO and not booting hda5 (ugh)

Is AIX or Solaris or SunOS or HP-UX a UNIX?

[Heather] AIX and Solaris are blessed with this trademark under "UNIX 98", HP-UX and Tru64 among others are blessed under "UNIX 95". (You can see the Open Group's Registered Product Catalog if you care:

http://www.opengroup.org/regproducts/catalog.htm

I don't think SunOS ever got so blessed; it was a BSD derivitive after all. You can read some about the confusions between SunOS and Solaris in this handy note:

http://www.math.umd.edu/~helpdesk/Online/GettingStarted/SunOS-Solaris.html

[Mitchell] Here's the deal on SOLARIS. IT IS UNIX. It still has portions that were (c) 198X by AT&T and USL.

Solaris (as opposed to SUN-OS) IS UNIX System V.4

AT&T merged Sun-OS back in with System V and got a bunch of stuff. especially the init systems we love, as well as package-add format.

btw, is there any demand in LINUX for users/programmers with SUN system V package-add experience?

[Heather] I imagine that places which are using Linux to mix Suns and PCs, with Solaris on their Sparcs, and Linux on the PCs... possibly even a more SysV-ish distro like Slackware... would find such programmers handy.

[Mitchell] (so because SUN is STILL the UNIX reference "port" for UNIX System V.4, --from the old days) it IS UNIX, and therefore doesn't need the blessing.

BTW, Solaris also has the distinction of being BOTH BSD, and System V.4 both in one.

a great deal of the product is now engineered to favor V.4, but there are still some BSD roots and compatibility there!

Mitch Bruntel
(ATT Labs-- maybe that's why I know this trivia?)

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