I basically spent this entire weekend on a single project1. You’ve already seen that I brought back the PDF of “Less known Solaris features” into the blog. But that was only the first step. There is now also a version that presents the individual chapters as HTML pages. While I was at it, I gave the documents a spelling and grammar review.
This naturally raises the question: “Why go through all this effort after so many years?” After all, these texts are at least 15 years old. There are several reasons. The eBook was an important piece of work for me, even though at some point I stopped working on it. There is a Solaris 11 version of it, but it never reached the point where I could and wanted to publish it. I essentially switched to a “continuous delivery” model with many smaller texts covering the changes in Solaris 11. After that I also experimented with other formats like the Solaris Cheat Sheet and a gargantuan “Solaris 11.4 — What’s new?” presentation I used internally and externally.
That I stopped working on it had a second reason as well: At some point in 2010, through a keyboard-to-chair interface error, I lost the current tarball with the TeX source. I had a PDF and a tarball. The two no longer matched. And I couldn’t reconcile them without a lot of work. This was also the biggest challenge in making these pages available as HTML. Converting from TeX to Markdown was easy; converting from PDF to Markdown was considerably harder. These pages will certainly need additional review.
But that doesn’t fully answer the question: So “Why, Jörg?” Because these texts hold a certain sentimental value for me given all the years I spent working with Solaris. Because while some things have become obsolete through technological progress, much of it can still be configured exactly the same way, even though Solaris has seen 16 more years of development. The information in this document still has value. There is still life in these texts. And because I don’t want the only version of the PDF shown by a major search engine to be a paid download on a website that makes its business collecting PDFs.2
That leaves a second question: “Why now?” A few days ago I was looking at the repository with all the old blog entries. I decided against bringing them back into active service. But the Less known Solaris Features series seemed worth the effort to clean up and bring back into the blog. And with this, it is hereby done: The Less known Solaris Features from 2010, as a website.
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Okay, besides grocery shopping, eating and sleeping. Oh, and cleaning the cage. What was I thinking when the birds moved in. I’m grateful that no larger animal has found its way to me by air, land or water. An elephant, for instance. Or a whale. A kangaroo would almost be socially acceptable as a flatmate. ↩
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The document was always available on archive.org. But you had to know what to look for. ↩
