I'm back in Solaris mode and I've hit a wall. Solaris 10 is Unix and that's great because visa-vi GNU/Linux I am very comfortable with Unix. Before I got my hands on my box I made the decision not for force my GNU/Linux habits onto Solaris because its probably a recipe for pointless frustration. So I'm very interested in learning the Solaris way of doing things. The issue I'm struggling with right now is patching and versioning. I don't understand how they fit together as a whole. Now I know I just said I wasn't going to force my GNU/Linux habits onto Solaris but I need to do a little compare and contrast to ensure that I'm asking the right question.
In Gentoo there is no explicit concept of a version. There are live CD releases such as 2006.1 or 2006.2 but you can't use that as a mechanism for discussing the version of Gentoo that's actually running on your box because as soon as you run emerge --sync && emerge -uD world or build your own kernel the whole version concept breaks down.
At the other extreme is Windows. You buy a copy of Windows of a specific version and it stays that way until Microsoft releases a new version and you explicitly purchase and install the new version. In the interim the most you can do is apply hot fixes and service packs. So to move from WinXP to Vista I would have to buy Vista and install clean or do an upgrade of my current WinXP install.
So which one is Solaris most like? Gentoo or Windows? Because I'm trying to get from Solaris 10 1/06 to 6/06 and I'm not sure how to get there.
With regards to patching and upgrades Solaris is more like Windows than like Gentoo. If you want to upgrade from Solaris 10 1/06 to 6/06 an upgrade will do the work and will keep all your configuration files. You could also do a clean install, where configuring the system will be left to the administrator. The good thing is that Solaris is completely free of charge.
ReplyDeleteSolaris has the notion of patches which you can install to fix certain issues found.