5 ms·

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". :)

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". :)