TR Forums

Ok I'm pretty naive when it comes to most things dealing with Sun. So what's the difference between Solaris 8 and Solaris 2.6?

Solaris 8 is newer.

Why keep them seperate then? or why even advertise 2.6?

as Sun introduces new processor architectures into their new machines, they start to drop support for older architectures in their OS. For instance, an old IPX, whose architecture is sun4c, CAN run Solaris 2.6, but cannot run Solaris 8 (2.8 as far as I'm concerned, but I digress).

Someone should correlate versions:

2.6 == 6
2.7 == 7
2.8 == 8

AFAIK Solaris 2.6 was always known as Solaris 2.6, but starting with 2.7 they called it Solaris 7, 8 etc. Sun has this thing about concurrent naming schemes. When they switched from calling it SunOS to Solaris, there were different numbers for each name, even though they were talking about the same release!

Solaris 2.6 is still popular. A lot of shops are still running that release for a variety of reasons. Large stable systems aren't quick to change, especially if there's nothing wrong with the old software. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." So you'll see older Sun boxes chugging merrily along with 2.6, while newer boxes that have PCI and USB will require the updated hardware support in 8. Apparently 7 was such a dog, most shops skipped it altogether.

The company I used to work for made Java app servers, and we certified our product on various platforms. We certified on Solaris 2.6 for one version, but needed some updated libraries from 2.7 for the next. Unfortunately, so many of our customers refused to use 2.7 that they didn't buy that product. Other things happened to the company before they got around to certifying it on 2.8.

If you're considering 2.8 for anything, though, remember that just like any Solaris version, without the appropriate patch level... it'll have problems

-Polare

Java, eh? Now that's irony fer ya!