[External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

[Laurent Blume]

Le 2014/12/04 20:46 +0100, George             Pw Wyche a écrit:
> If you want to play the #s, then fine. However, your characterization
> is faulty.
>
> Our Sun workstations are all in house. Not a single one has access to
> anything outside. All are Solaris 8. Now and then somebody asks for a
> feature which does exist for Solaris 8, so we used to easily get it
> from openCSW. This is a small outfit... this department. It's a
> Windows place that'd just as soon get rid all *nix anything, but they
> inherited us and moved us around on the books, so nobody outside has
> been exposed (for any length of time) to our Solaris workstations and
> see the light of another world of computing.

Well, it is your choice, but then, if your attachment to those old 
systems is so great, you should plan on keeping them running. The S8 
packages haven't changed in 4 years, you can surely spend 5€ on a USB 
key to keep a mirror of them.

> We did not download the entire offering of openCSW Solaris 8. I did
> pay $ for DVDs back in the time of Blastwave, but evidently "it was
> lost in the mail". We really screwed up by not doing what was
> absolutely necessary to capture the entire offering of Solaris 10
> BEFORE OpenCSW had advanced past the version where you could install
> Solaris with 5 CDs, because after that... too bad if you don't have a
> DVD reader, no later version of Solaris 10 for you.

You can perfectly well install Solaris 10 from the CD version then 
either patch or update it to a level that can run OpenCSW.

> Without the later
> version of Solaris 10... Grr! We have Solaris 8 because we cannot get
> Solaris 10 with the same set of features as Solaris 8.

I'm curious, what features are missing in Solaris 10? In any recent 
Linux distro, for that matter?

And not to worry you too much, but basing a business, and your job, on 
Solaris workstations doesn't sound like the best future-proofing ever. 
You might not like it, I sure don't like it, but fact is, Solaris on the 
desktop is dead, and won't come back.

So, are you volunteering to maintain S8 packages until you can get 
around to replace it?

Laurent