Comments on: In Other BSDs for 2018/10/13 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/10/13/in-other-bsds-for-2018-10-13/ A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD. Sat, 27 Oct 2018 04:31:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.4 By: Justin Sherrill https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/10/13/in-other-bsds-for-2018-10-13/comment-page-1/#comment-487722 Sun, 14 Oct 2018 15:02:18 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=21906#comment-487722 I have noticed that older technology has this sort of distillation action: less of it may be out there, but the ones that remain are REALLY necessary – so people are more willing to pay for the resources to support them.

So in this case, the number of old post-SunOS and pre-Oracle Solaris installation is always dwindling, but the ones that are sticking around are mission-critical. At least that’s my theory.

(See also: COBOL)

]]> By: Corey https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/10/13/in-other-bsds-for-2018-10-13/comment-page-1/#comment-487721 Sun, 14 Oct 2018 05:05:12 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=21906#comment-487721 Roo is correct. I remember using the site quite a bit in the early oughts to get useful software for some Solaris 2.5.1 boxes I had. It was much easier than trying to build that stuff yourself.

Back then it was called SunFreeware (sunfreeware.com) and it was, as the name implies, free as in beer. The guy that ran it put in a lot of work, figuring out the latest GCC that would run on each version of Solaris, then the latest version of each OSS package that would compile and run in the resulting environment. I guess it took so much time that he decided to try and make some money at it, and I bought a subscription for a couple years to support his work. Interesting that it is still around.

]]> By: Roo https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/10/13/in-other-bsds-for-2018-10-13/comment-page-1/#comment-487719 Sun, 14 Oct 2018 03:21:52 +0000 https://www.dragonflydigest.com/?p=21906#comment-487719 RE: unixpackages for Solaris.

For context why this would be worth the money. For Solaris 2.5, Sun didn’t ship a compiler with the system. You could buy the SPARC Workshop compilers, but almost no opensource would compile with them out of the box as back then things assumed gcc (much like today before clang really took off).

You could bootstrap gcc, and all the open source packages you needed, but that meant individually going out and getting the source packages, configuring them correctly, some may work correctly, some may need fixing for your system.
And large compiles may take hours.

Imagine the convience for corporate users of just getting a package and adding it to the system instead of mucking through all that.

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