Solaris Operating Environment

The Solaris Operating System is a computer operating system, based on the open-source Unix SunOS developed by Sun Microsystems. Solaris is being released under the Common Development and Distribution License, an OSI-certified Open-Source license.

Early versions were based on BSD UNIX, and were simply called SunOS. The shift to a System V code base in SunOS 5 was marked by changing the marketing name to Solaris 2; thus SunOS 5.0 was marketed as Solaris 2.0. After version 2.6, Sun dropped the 2. from the name, so SunOS 5.10 is marketed as Solaris 10. Earlier versions were retroactively named Solaris 1.x. The term SunOS is still used to refer to the underlying operating system itself, and Solaris is considered to be the SunOS operating system plus a graphical user environment, ONC+, and networking and other enhancements.

= License =

Solaris 10 is free software now in terms of licensing. Both binary and source versions have been downloadable without cost at various times in the past, although under changing terms and restrictions as Sun explored a number of business models. Sun s Common Development and Distribution License, which was approved after review by Open Source Initiative, has been selected as the license for OpenSolaris, which was seeded on June 14, 2005, from the current Solaris development code. Future releases of Solaris (Sun s official version) will be derived from OpenSolaris.

= Supporting architectures =

Solaris uses a common code base for both architectures it supports: SPARC and x86. Solaris was also ported to the PowerPC architecture for version 2.5.1, but the port was cancelled almost as soon as it was released. Solaris 10 is available for x86-64 as well as SPARC and x86 architectures. Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to Symmetric_multiprocessing and supporting a large number of Central processing unit. Sun also plans to implement parts of Linux APIs in Solaris 10, allowing Solaris to natively run Linux binaries on x86 systems.

Solaris is tightly integrated with Sun s SPARC hardware, and is designed and marketed as a combined package. This has often led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium over commodity PC hardware. However, since the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs (like AMD64), the latest version of Solaris, Solaris 10, has been designed with x86-64 architecture in mind. Sun heavily marketed Solaris on x86 with its AMD64-based entry-level server.

= Desktop environment=

The first Solaris , is included with Solaris 10.

= Versions =

The most recent versions of Solaris (as of 2005) are:

Solaris 7 and Solaris 2.6 are no longer shipping but still supported. Earlier versions are unsupported.

SunOS is still used as the term to describe the core of Solaris. The version number of the SunOS core lying underneath Solaris is 5.{the Solaris version number}. For example, the latest Solaris release, Solaris 10, runs on SunOS 5.10. Solaris man pages are labeled with SunOS, and the startup sequence displays it, but the term SunOS is no longer used in Sun marketing documents.

A [http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/solaris/versions/ more comprehensive summary] of earlier Solaris versions is also available.

= See also =

*OpenSolaris *Comparison of operating systems *Common Development and Distribution License *Solaris Volume Manager

= External links =

*[http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ Official Solaris page] *[http://www.opensolaris.org The OpenSolaris Project page] *[http://www.adminschoice.com/ Adminschoice.com] - Solaris system administration articles *[http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/ BigAdmin] *[http://www.sunfreeware.com/ Sunfreeware.com] - Freeware for Solaris *[http://www.blastwave.org/ Blastwave.org] - Collection of Solaris software packages *[http://www.sunhelp.org/ SunHELP] - Solaris news, resources, and discussion *[http://www.solariscentral.org/ Solaris Central] - Solaris news and discussion *[http://alanpae.tripod.com/ Sun Country] - Hundreds of Solaris related links *[http://tuxmobil.org/mobile_solaris.html Solaris on mobile computers (laptops, notebooks)] *[http://www.solaris-x86.org/ Solaris x86] - Solaris x86 portal *[http://www.opensolaris.org/ OpenSolaris.org] *[http://www.cuddletech.com/ Cuddletech] - Sun Enterprise and Veritas tutorials