Thanks Paula, Howard, Anju and Terry. Quite strange version scheme, but
now it is clear to me.

Thanks and a nice weekend.
f_x

Paula Ehn wrote:

I was a Sun Systems Engineer for several years when the transition to the
Solaris name occurred.

Originally Sun supported only one version of their OS. It was for the SPARC
architecture only and was called SunOS and the version before the transition to
the Solaris name was something along the lines of SunOS 4.4.1u. Then Sun ported
their OS to the Intel architecture and it had different version numbers of
course. At the same time they also changed from a BSD UNIX to an System V UNIX
on both platforms. To market both versions they put a blanket name of Solaris on
both and tried to synchronize their version numbers somewhat. So out came
Solaris 2.3 which was in reality on the SPARC side was SunOS 5.3 (I won't even
talk about Solaris 2.1 and 2.2 because they were not generally used and not very
good). Similarly the following are the same SPARC version:

Solaris 2.4 -> SunOS 5.4
Solaris 2.5 -> SunOS 5.5
Solaris 2.6 -> SunOS 5.6
Solaris 7 -> SunOS 5.7
Solaris 8 -> SunOS 5.8
Solaris 9 -> SunOS 5.9
etc.

The Solaris version change to 7 instead of 2.7 came from Sun trying to have a
higher version number then Windows NT at the time. Another marketing ploy.
Microsoft of course countered this by coming out with Windows 2000.

If you look at the default /etc/motd file on your Solaris box you will see the
SunOS version listed with no reference to Solaris. uname -a will also give it
too you.

Paula

Date:    Thu, 1 Jul 2004 17:38:50 +0200
From:    f_x <f_x AT GMX DOT NET>
Subject: Solaris versions

Hello,

i have a question about the Solaris OS versions. As i know Solaris exists
as version 2.6, 7, 8 ,9. The Legato support matrix lists also this
versions. Now i have the request to backup Solaris 2.8 and 5.8. Can
someone explain the Sun versioning style to me?

thanks in advance

 -----------------------------------------------------------------
| Paula Ehn  VE4MHZ/VE4HZ                    Room 624 Eng.        |
| Unix System Administrator                  pehn AT cc.umanitoba DOT ca |
| Academic Computing and Networking          (204)474-7849        |
| University of Manitoba                     Fax: (204) 474-7920  |
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