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Nostalgia is weird. I started my professional career on Solaris machines and spent like 20% of my time for the first few months compiling a GNU ecosystem, Emacs

Nostalgia is weird. I started my professional career on Solaris machines and spent like 20% of my time for the first few months compiling a GNU ecosystem, Emacs, vim, and replacing Sun window manager with IceWM.

tyingq 5y ago
Also some percentage complaining about yp/nis.
zippergz 5y ago
Trying to turn Solaris into Linux was a mistake back then. Most of their stuff worked better than the gnu equivalents if you put in the effort to learn it.
- simtel20 5y ago
  At the time of 2.6 that was not the case. Cpio, tar could open archives created on other platforms. bash had readline. awk, sed, find, xargs - handing no ills spaces newlines etc. Dd would let you handle errors. Pretty much every gnu tool was more flexible and allowed you to do things that the sun tools just wouldn't.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    This! Readline, bash completion, GNU Screen, reasonably modern C++ supported by a compiler, familiar environment that I used in Linux at home, and ls with colors! No, I knew even back then that SunOS and Solaris are famous for their reliability, admin tooling, and SMP support, but I have never cared about that. Learning Solaris-specific stuff felt like a waste of time back then already and so it was.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      The funny thing about my journey with Linux since the 1990s was that I wanted something to run X-Windows on so I could access the Sparc boxes at work. Here I am in 2021 still using Linux to access a sparc box, although it's just for fun now and sparc is being emulated.
- drewg123 5y ago
  At least in the early 90s, most of the support programs on the commercial unixes were ancient BSD stuff from 10 years previous and just sucked. No command line editing, limited functionality, etc. This is why GNU became so incredibly popular. From the top of my head - GNU tar did compression in one step with the "z" flag, native tar did not - gzip compressed produced smaller compressed files than "compress" did, was usually faster, and understood stuff compressed via the vendor compress. - gdb was much more usable that dbx or adb - gcc was free, and supported much newer standards than the vendor compiler. And you had a much better shot at compiling stuff you found on the web without tweaking Makefiles to adjust compiler flags.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    On the other hand, properly knowing UNIX/POSIX meant being confortable dropping into any random UNIX box at customer site and being able to sort out their problems without any kind of extra tooling.
    - mynegation 5y ago
      That is very true if it was the part of yours job description. For me it was not. I was face with a clean slate Solaris maybe twice during that period and each time I just had enough knowledge of BSD stuff, csh, and bare bones vi to bootstrap into the familiar environment (which was kind of fun, sort of like moving into a new home and making it cozy).
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        My job description was more of the kind "make customers happy". :)
smackeyacky 5y ago
Yep nostalgia is weird. Some of the software from that time just feels weird and constricting (Windows 3.11 or the contemporary Mac operating systems). Solaris doesn't quite feel modern but it sure is a lot closer to modern than Windows 3.11
pjmlp 5y ago
Why bother with compiling when there used to exist a Solaris package repository for most of them?
- mynegation 5y ago
  1. Not all packages were available. 2. Versions were quite old. 3. I did not have admin at first and when I did I did not want to mess with this 4. The disk where / was mounted was on a smaller side and most of my stuff was on a secondary mounted large disk. 5. Work practice as I was responsible for maintaining the build of our product on several Unix platforms.
- drewg123 5y ago
  I admin'ed other machines at the time (DEC Alphas), but the guys who cared for the Sun systems ignored the package repo. I think it was because the packages were out of date. It also could have been because disk space was expensive, and they preferred to keep open source stuff in NFS to save space on the individual workstations. As I recall, our locally compiled packages were kept in NFS, and there was a giant symlink tree that pointed to the latest version, but left the old version intact for backwards compat. Eg /opt/pkg/bin/gcc pointed to /opt/pkg/gcc-2.95.2/bin/gcc, but used to point to /opt/pkg/gcc-2.95.1
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I see, actually I don't recall how much up to date that repository used to be. Just found it out, after some Google-fu, http://www.sunfreeware.com/introduction.html http://www.sunfreeware.com/introduction.html Still online, amazing.

tyingq 5y ago

Also some percentage complaining about yp/nis.

zippergz 5y ago

Trying to turn Solaris into Linux was a mistake back then. Most of their stuff worked better than the gnu equivalents if you put in the effort to learn it.

simtel20 5y ago
At the time of 2.6 that was not the case. Cpio, tar could open archives created on other platforms. bash had readline. awk, sed, find, xargs - handing no ills spaces newlines etc. Dd would let you handle errors. Pretty much every gnu tool was more flexible and allowed you to do things that the sun tools just wouldn't.
- mynegation 5y ago
  This! Readline, bash completion, GNU Screen, reasonably modern C++ supported by a compiler, familiar environment that I used in Linux at home, and ls with colors! No, I knew even back then that SunOS and Solaris are famous for their reliability, admin tooling, and SMP support, but I have never cared about that. Learning Solaris-specific stuff felt like a waste of time back then already and so it was.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    The funny thing about my journey with Linux since the 1990s was that I wanted something to run X-Windows on so I could access the Sparc boxes at work. Here I am in 2021 still using Linux to access a sparc box, although it's just for fun now and sparc is being emulated.
drewg123 5y ago
At least in the early 90s, most of the support programs on the commercial unixes were ancient BSD stuff from 10 years previous and just sucked. No command line editing, limited functionality, etc. This is why GNU became so incredibly popular. From the top of my head - GNU tar did compression in one step with the "z" flag, native tar did not - gzip compressed produced smaller compressed files than "compress" did, was usually faster, and understood stuff compressed via the vendor compress. - gdb was much more usable that dbx or adb - gcc was free, and supported much newer standards than the vendor compiler. And you had a much better shot at compiling stuff you found on the web without tweaking Makefiles to adjust compiler flags.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  On the other hand, properly knowing UNIX/POSIX meant being confortable dropping into any random UNIX box at customer site and being able to sort out their problems without any kind of extra tooling.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    That is very true if it was the part of yours job description. For me it was not. I was face with a clean slate Solaris maybe twice during that period and each time I just had enough knowledge of BSD stuff, csh, and bare bones vi to bootstrap into the familiar environment (which was kind of fun, sort of like moving into a new home and making it cozy).
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      My job description was more of the kind "make customers happy". :)

smackeyacky 5y ago

Yep nostalgia is weird. Some of the software from that time just feels weird and constricting (Windows 3.11 or the contemporary Mac operating systems). Solaris doesn't quite feel modern but it sure is a lot closer to modern than Windows 3.11

pjmlp 5y ago

Why bother with compiling when there used to exist a Solaris package repository for most of them?

mynegation 5y ago
1. Not all packages were available. 2. Versions were quite old. 3. I did not have admin at first and when I did I did not want to mess with this 4. The disk where / was mounted was on a smaller side and most of my stuff was on a secondary mounted large disk. 5. Work practice as I was responsible for maintaining the build of our product on several Unix platforms.
drewg123 5y ago
I admin'ed other machines at the time (DEC Alphas), but the guys who cared for the Sun systems ignored the package repo. I think it was because the packages were out of date. It also could have been because disk space was expensive, and they preferred to keep open source stuff in NFS to save space on the individual workstations. As I recall, our locally compiled packages were kept in NFS, and there was a giant symlink tree that pointed to the latest version, but left the old version intact for backwards compat. Eg /opt/pkg/bin/gcc pointed to /opt/pkg/gcc-2.95.2/bin/gcc, but used to point to /opt/pkg/gcc-2.95.1
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I see, actually I don't recall how much up to date that repository used to be. Just found it out, after some Google-fu, http://www.sunfreeware.com/introduction.html http://www.sunfreeware.com/introduction.html Still online, amazing.