Way back in the dark ages of 1993, we were introduced to this thing called email. Email in the olden days was not like email now. All the packets traveled uphill no matter where they were going, and usually there was a good three or four feet of snow on the internet backbone. We used these big hulking things called VAX/VMS nodes that were attached to some pretty sweet fourteen inch monochrome VT 100 terminals. There were also these machines that ran something called UNIX, which sounded to us like something that should have been found in the college health center, not the computer lab.

Eons passed, and things changed. Though there were many more email packets flying around, plate tectonics had changed the course of things so that now they traveled downhill, really really fast. The internet backbone became a series of tubes. All the VT 100 terminals banded together and created an archipelago in the South Pacific. And UNIX...

UNIX evolved. Mutated. It trickled down into various UNIX brands and distributions. There were things like BSD UNIX, HP-UX, and AT&T Bell Labs UNIX. There were other branches, too, rogue sprouts on the evolutionary tree: FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Slightly alien but vaguely reminiscent life forms injected their DNA into the gene pool: Linux, and this weird little UNIX-esque animal called Solaris.

Sun recently let Solaris go open source. OpenSolaris is more a traditional UNIX environment than a Linux type environment, but the appeal of taking a peek at the 2008.05 OpenSolaris release was too great for us to resist. The folks at OpenSolaris knew this, and baked some goodies into the OS that no Linux user could refuse.

We were given a no-strings attached liveCD, so our Linux install would never know we cheated. We had a bash shell, and the GNOME desktop environment, so our eye candy and commands would feel familiar and easy.

Sometimes, though, evolution goes horribly, horribly wrong.