difference between SunOS Release and Solaris Release Post: 34588

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers difference between SunOS Release and Solaris Release Post 34588 by RTM on Friday 28th of February 2003 09:39:17 AM

02-28-2003

Registered User

In the begining....

Quote:

The two major types of UNIX are
BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)

System V

The locations of commands and the options supported by certain commands are different between these two types of UNIX.

BSD UNIX was developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. In the early 1980s, the University of California acquired the source code to UNIX from AT&T Bell Labs and significantly modified it to produce BSD UNIX.

Although the University of California has stopped distributing BSD UNIX, current versions of it are available from many sources. The most common versions of BSD are OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. Some older machines from Sun Microsystems run a modified version of BSD called SunOS.

System V (sometimes abbreviated as SysV) is the latest version of UNIX released by AT&T Bell Labs. It is based on the original version of UNIX developed in the early 1970s. System V UNIX is the standard for commercial versions of UNIX. Both Solaris (the newest version of SunOS) and HP-UX are based on System V UNIX.

SunOS is the name of the UNIX operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. SunOS was originally based on BSD UNIX but has since changed to be based on System V UNIX. Although Sun Microsystems changed the marketing name of the new version to Solaris, both versions produce the output SunOS when uname is run.

To use the correct versions of commands, shell scripts that have to run on both Solaris and the old SunOS must be able to detect the difference between these two versions.

To determine whether a system is running Solaris or SunOS, you need to determine the version of the operating system. SunOS versions 5 and higher are Solaris (System V-based); SunOS versions 4 and lower are SunOS (BSD-based).

To determine the version of the operating system, use the -r option of uname:

$ uname -r
5.5.1
This indicates that the version of the operating system is 5.5.1. If you want to add the operating system's name to this output, use the -r and the -s options:

$ uname -rs
SunOS 5.5.1

(Information found at
visi0n.net ) Doing a search on goggle will gain you even more information and reading. Solaris still shows the SunOS but it doesn't mean as much as when we went from SunOS 4.1.x to Solaris. These days it's probably hard to find a 4.1.x system still running.

RTM

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LEARN ABOUT SUNOS

uname

uname(2)							   System Calls 							  uname(2)

NAME

       uname - get name of current operating system

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/utsname.h>

       int uname(struct utsname *name);

DESCRIPTION

       The uname() function stores information identifying the current operating system in the structure pointed to by name.

       The uname() function uses the utsname structure, defined in <sys/utsname.h>, whose members include:

       char    sysname[SYS_NMLN];
       char    nodename[SYS_NMLN];
       char    release[SYS_NMLN];
       char    version[SYS_NMLN];
       char    machine[SYS_NMLN];

       The  uname()  function returns a null-terminated character string naming the current operating system in the character array sysname. Simi-
       larly, the nodename member contains the name by which the system is known on a communications network.  The  release  and  version  members
       further identify the operating system. The machine member contains a standard name that identifies the hardware on which the operating sys-
       tem is running.

RETURN VALUES

       Upon successful completion, a non-negative value is returned. Otherwise, -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

       The uname() function will fail if:

       EFAULT	       The name argument points to an illegal address.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Interface Stability	     |Standard			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |MT-Level		     |Async-Signal-Safe 	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       uname(1), sysinfo(2), sysconf(3C), attributes(5), standards(5)

SunOS 5.10							    21 Jul 1999 							  uname(2)