Solaris Operating Environment
The Solaris Operating Environment (OE) (Solaris) is a computer operating system, the proprietary Unix variant developed by Sun Microsystems (Solaris is slated to be released under on OSI certified Open-Source license with the release of Solaris 10 by the fifth week of 2005.)
Early versions, based on BSD UNIX, were called SunOS. The shift to a System V code base in SunOS 5 was marked by changing the name to Solaris 2. Earlier versions were retroactively named Solaris 1.x. After version 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name; the most recent versions (as of early 2002) are Solaris 7, the 64-bit Solaris 8, and Solaris 9 which was released 22 May 2002.
The Solaris OE consists of the SunOS UNIX base operating system plus a graphical user environment. The first Solaris GUI was OpenWindows (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806-2901). It was followed by CDE in Solaris 2.6, and has been changed to GNOME for Solaris 10. Sun's Java Desktop System (http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/) is also available to run on Solaris.
Solaris is primarily written to run on SPARC processors. There is also a version called Solaris-x86 that runs on PCs. Solaris 10 is expected to be available for AMD64 as well as SPARC and x86 when it is released in January 2005. Sun has done work to incorporate the Linux Standard Base into the Solaris 10 kernel, allowing Solaris x86 to natively run Linux binaries.
Solaris 10 was unveiled on November 15, 2004, but the software is not scheduled to be released until late January 2005.
Solaris was proprietary rather than free software, but both binary and source versions have been freely downloadable at various times. Sun recently confirmed (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&e=7&u=/ap/sun_solaris10) their intention to make Solaris 10 free software under the OpenSolaris (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/) project.
See also
External links
- Official Solaris page (http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/)
- BigAdmin (http://www.sun.com/bigadmin)
- Sunfreeware.com (http://www.sunfreeware.com/) - Freeware for Solaris
- Blastwave.org (http://www.blastwave.org/) - Collection of Solaris software packages
- SunHELP (http://www.sunhelp.org/) - Solaris news, resources, and discussion
- Solaris Central (http://www.solariscentral.org/) - Solaris news and discussion
- Sun Country (http://alanpae.tripod.com/) - Hundreds of Solaris related links
- Solaris on mobile computers (laptops, notebooks) (http://tuxmobil.org/mobile_solaris.html)
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