[daip] Solaris - AIPS compatibility

[Patrick P. Murphy]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001 17:20:31 -0600 , "Hough, David H." <DHough at Trinity.edu>
   said: 

> I'm having a UNIX person come out tomorrow to give me a long-overdue
> upgrade to my Sun operating system.  I'm running 15APR99 AIPS - and want
> to avoid also reinstalling AIPS if I can help it - and the guy asked me
> if I want Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 8 (yes, just "8", not 2.8).

This name change is marketing, pure and simple.  If you do "uname -sr" on
any Solaris or SunOS system, you'll get back its identity as "SunOS A.B"
or possibly A.B.C, where A is either 4 or 5.  Here's a quick table:

       SunOS Version      Solaris Version
       4.x                ---
       5.x                2.x                   0 < x < 7
       5.7                2.7
       5.8                8  (or 2.8)

Hope this doesn't leave you more confused!

> Since I've never heard of Solaris 8, I was going to ask 
> him to install Solaris 2.6 (I have 2.5.1 now). 

Based on some 3rd party reports, I *think* existing Solaris binaries from
SunOS 5.5 will run fine on 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8.  There should not be any need
to rebuild.  On the other hand, I would be shirking my responsibilities if
I didn't recommend that you consider upgrading to 31DEC00 (soon to be
frozen) or 31DEC01 (the new "midnight job" version).  There have been a
lot of improvements, bug fixes, etc.

I believe 5.6 may give you a slight performance boost (2-3% at most?) over
any 5.5 system, but our Solaris installed base here at NRAO/CV is rapidly
becoming very small indeed so I'm a little rusty on the specifics.  We're
primarily a Linux shop on the Unix side of things now.  The price-
performance for AIPS usage has driven this change; it's hard to ignore the
compelling advantage Intel/Linux has had for the past several years.

				- Pat
-- 
  Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.            Division Head, Charlottesville Computing
  (804) 296-0372, 296-0236                National Radio Astronomy Observatory
  Home: http://www.chien-noir.com/      Work: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
   "Linux is Inevitable."  "Why?"  "Because it's alive!" - John MadDog Hall