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Discussion on: Choosing a Linux distro

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

illumos was born as SunOS in the early 80s)

The SunOS that Illumos was born from was SunOS 5/Solaris — originally a SysV-derived OS. The 80s SunOS that was derived from BSD was SunOS 4.

Illumos was one of the projects I played with late in the part of my career where I was Solaris engineer for a a global ISP. A number of us looked at Illumos and Nexenta because Oracle kept throwing the viability of OpenSolaris in doubt ...before eventually killing it altogether. Both were options where we could have Solaris-y systems at home, keeping our work-related skills up, without having to pay to run Solaris.

and a loyal fanbase without the init system war.

Mostly because all of the people that slit their wrists over Solaris's SMF left the field. And, let me tell you, when Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) came out, the hue and cry about SMF was similar to that around systemd. ;)

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tux0r profile image
tux0r • Edited

Thank you for the correction. Put it in relation, even today's "BSD" began its life as the Net/2 release, over a decade later...

I came to Solaris too late, in 2017. Still trying to understand some of its deeper semantics. What I can tell is that it is incredibly well-thought. No surprise given the mind power that gave it its life...

SMF does not seem to break my boot process though. ;-)

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Sounds like you missed the joy of the post-Berkeley FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD days. In the waning years of my time at college, those BSDs and Linux were all beta-level offerings. Post college and jonesing for my own UNIX-y system to run at home, I tried all of them. Eventually settled on Linux (with forays into IRIX and Solaris in the mid-90s and then Solaris, AIX and HPUX in the mid-2000s). These days, mostly RHEL/CentOS ...because it's what pays the bills. =)

When SMF first came out, it had a lot of teething pains similar to systemd's. Then again, so did a number of technologies in Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). ZFS, LDOMs and Zones all had their joys. Being a tinkerer, I ended up finding a lot of "edge cases" (as their Support group liked to call them). Fortunately, the most frequent "edge cases" happened at home. That said, during my (third-part vendor-partner) consulting days, I had to help one large financial institution that got bit pretty bad by a scheduler problem on a SF25000 attached to a large EMC array presenting a few thousand LUNs.

At any rate, haven't really touched Solaris since I sat for my Solaris 11 SA test. Sun had offered me it, at the time, as a beta test-taker as part of their efforts to get people to adopt Solaris 11. Other than helping customers move from Solaris to RHEL/CentOS, haven't really had to deal with Solaris since 2008.