SunOS 5.6/Solaris 2.6 (1997)

A glimpse into the commercial System V world: Sun's Unix that powered countless engineering workstations.

Solaris 2.6, released in 1997, is an operating environment built on SunOS 5.6. Unlike earlier SunOS releases (4.x and earlier), which are derived from BSD Unix, SunOS 5.6 is based on System V Release 4 (SVR4).

SunOS 5.6 clearly shows its System V heritage. To me, the most obvious difference is how startup scripts are organized. SunOS 4.x uses files such as /etc/rc, /etc/rc.boot, and /etc/rc.local. On a System V-derived system, however, the startup scripts are stored in /etc/init.d/. Solaris has eight run levels: 0-6 and S (or s). Hard links or symbolic links to the scripts are placed in /etc/rc[0-6].d/. The appropriate scripts are then run when the system enters a particular run level.

This installation runs on an emulated SPARCstation 20 with 128 MB of RAM.

Want to give it a try? Launch Telnet and connect like this:

% telnet telnet.final-hop.net 40024

Already logged in to another machine in the exhibition? Use:

% telnet sunos5.exhib.unix

Terminal session showing the SunOS 5.6 shell immediately after login — SunOS 5.6 immediately after login.

Once you are logged in, read After login to configure your terminal for the most reliable experience.