Solaris-to-Linux Porting Guide

Albert writes: "This article is the best guide I've seen for moving your Solaris applications over to Linux. It provides guidelines, suggestions, and resources to help deal with porting your application from Sun Solaris to Linux. You also get access to an online tool that shows how the specific APIs used by your Solaris application map to Linux. This is a great resource."

Easier guide:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Buy very expensive Solaris machine.

2) Forget about Linux and use a real Unix like Solaris.

3) Have a beer or two while Linux-freak buddy screams about how Microsoft makes it so hard to install Linux on Sun boxes.

Re:Easier guide:

[Mr. Foogle]

Don't know about *your* shop but where I work we have a place for Solaris AND Linux AND MS Windows. Our Holy Grail is 'unix' stability/performance on 'intel' (read cheap) hardware.

What's standing in my way are the developers of our CAD tools. Cadence isn't going there (we don't see any evidence that 'you' want it) and Mentor STARTED to port to Linux, but stopped short of porting the bits that WE use (lack of market demand).

Really quite sensible

[rowlingj]

Sun's staff also recommend using GCC for your own development on Solaris, rather than using the Sun compiler.

Simple reason: GCC is far cheaper and it's sensible to make your code portable if you are not writing hardware-specific code.

The only time I would imagine that the Sun compiler would be one's choice, was if you either worked at Sun or you were OEMing some hardware driver (and needed to hook into someone else's work).

Re:With the added benefit of....

[biohazard99]

My post was meant to be funny, I only use Solaris from the command line, no need for a gui with apache, bind, sendmail, or INN. The only time I was on a GUI was a SparcStation5 with CDE at the for university 2 weeks, then I moved to the debian lab across the hall (PI 133/166 with twm or FVWM)

Linux/SPARC support dropping...

[Xpilot]

Step 2 says to test the to-be-ported software on Linux-Sparc, but interest in the platform seems to be waning among Linux developers these days. I use RH6.2 on an Ultra 10 at my University, and it really rocks. I just hope UltraSPARC support will continue for those distro's that haven't killed it off yet.