Solaris

[zealous]

hi there,

can anybody tell me wht exactly solaris is and wht are its advanced features. me quite new to this name so need help on it.

[SKULLZ1987]

ever heard of google?

Just google 'Solaris Advanced Features' or try something like 'Solaris Help' or 'Solaris Knowledge'

As long as it has the keywords that your looking it should be no problem.

[lucky_chouhan]

Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is certified against the Single Unix Specification as a version of Unix. Although Solaris is still proprietary software, the core OS has been made into an open source project,

History
In the early 1990s Sun replaced the BSD-derived SunOS 4 with a version of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed with AT&T. The underlying release name was SunOS 5.0, but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: Solaris 2. While SunOS 4.1.x micro releases were retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the name Solaris is almost exclusively used to refer to SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later.[2]

Solaris is considered to be the SunOS operating system plus a graphical user environment, ONC+, and other components. The SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release name; for example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.10 forms the core of Solaris 10.


[edit] Supported architectures
Solaris uses a common code base for the architectures it supports: SPARC and x86 (including x86-64). It was also ported to the PowerPC architecture (PowerPC Reference Platform) for version 2.5.1, but the port was cancelled almost as soon as it was released. Support for Itanium was at one time planned but never brought to market.[3] Sun also plan to implement support for the ABI of the Linux platform in a future update to Solaris 10, allowing Solaris to run native Linux binaries on x86 systems. This feature is called "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications" or SCLA.[4]

Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to SMP, supporting a large number of CPUs.[5] It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware, with which it is designed and marketed as a combined package, and has included support for 64-bit SPARC applications since Solaris 7. This has often led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium over commodity PC hardware. However, it has also supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and the latest version of Solaris, Solaris 10, has been designed with AMD64 in mind, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the AMD64 architecture. Sun has heavily marketed Solaris with its AMD64-based workstations and servers, which range from dual-core to 16-core models as of December 2006.


[edit] Desktop environments
The first Solaris desktop environment was OpenWindows, previously bundled with SunOS 4.1.x releases. It was superseded by CDE in Solaris 2.5 onwards. Sun's Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME, is included with Solaris 10.


[edit] License
Solaris's source code (with a few exceptions) has been released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) via the OpenSolaris project.[6] The CDDL is an OSI-approved license.[7] It is considered by the Free Software Foundation to be free but incompatible with the GPL.[8]

OpenSolaris was seeded on June 14, 2005 from the then-current Solaris development code base; both binary and source versions are currently downloadable and licensed without cost. Source for upcoming features such as Xen support is now added to the OpenSolaris project as a matter of course, and Sun has said that future releases of Solaris proper will henceforth be derived from OpenSolaris.