[HN Gopher] Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
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Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
 
Author : zdw
Score  : 28 points
Date   : 2023-04-13 01:11 UTC (1 days ago)
 
web link (john-millikin.com)
w3m dump (john-millikin.com)
 
| ablyveiled wrote:
| Those installation profiles remind me of `archinstall`. Of
| course, the choices there are more about the fragmented linux
| userspace than one's vocation.
 
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Im not going to name names, but i know of a system still using
| sunos 4 in prod...
| 
| I really loved solaris. Its such a shame how sun worked out. Oh
| well. FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris
| 10...
 
  | xarope wrote:
  | Sun's attempt to build a massively multi-thread system failed
  | at that time, it's interesting to see the direction we have
  | moved, almost 20 years later again (I say this whilst building
  | a "new" 2nd hand epyc system with 32 cores...)
 
| InTheArena wrote:
| This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was
| awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to SunOS4
| (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5).
 
  | nobody9999 wrote:
  | >This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was
  | awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to
  | SunOS4 (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5).
  | 
  | I take your point, but I'd say that the various BSDs are more
  | the successors to Sunos(1-4) than is GNU/Linux.
  | 
  | Since (and it pissed me off at the time) SunOS5+ (Solaris) has
  | a sysV admin/userland (as does GNU/Linux), whereas the BSDs are
  | much closer to what SunOS 4 and its predecessors (based on
  | various Unix/BSD codebases. IIRC, SunOS 4.4 -- the last version
  | that wasn't "Solaris" was based on BSD4.3[0])
  | 
  | All that said, Solaris had some pretty impressive features that
  | Linux is _still_ catching up with. E.g., Zones[1], ZFS[2], etc.
  | 
  | At the same time, there was much more of the "hacker" dynamic
  | with SunOS4 (and its predecessors) than Solaris. Which has also
  | been the case with GNU/Linux.
  | 
  | The former because before Linux (not to mention 386BSD[3]),
  | Unix OS licenses (let alone the hardware it ran on) were way
  | too expensive for widespread use. As such, it was mostly
  | college students using their Sun Boxen to hack on.
  | 
  | But once there was _free_ (as in libre _and_ --well, mostly--
  | as in beer) Unix (386BSD) and Unix-like (Linux) available for
  | _commodity_ hardware, many, many more folks could access *nix
  | systems to hack on.
  | 
  | From a technical standpoint the BSDs are the real successors to
  | SunOS, but from a Dev/hacker culture standpoint, Linux is (as
  | you point out) a successor as well.
  | 
  | [0]
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
  | 
  | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers
  | 
  | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
  | 
  | [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [4]
  | 
  | [4] As an aside, I'm enormously grateful to Lynne and Bill
  | Jolitz for 386BSD. It was a joy to be able to own and use it on
  | my own hardware back then. Especially since $job at the time
  | was mostly on Sun/SPARC. With an additional shout out to
  | Yggdrasil Linux[5], the first Linux distro I ever installed and
  | enjoyed that a lot too!
  | 
  | [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
 
  | johnisgood wrote:
  | I miss OpenSolaris! (I know about OpenIndiana)
 
| [deleted]
 
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I used the old HotJava browser (in Solaris, not SunOS) to do
| initial file transfers when I was playing with QEMU, but both
| operating systems should have a working install of tftp that you
| can use instead. https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/time-
| machine-solari...
 
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(page generated 2023-04-14 23:00 UTC)