Solaris is an "industrial-strength" version of UNIX made by SunMicrosystems, who also make hardware. It's available for both Sun SPARC processors and the x86 architecture.

The core operating system is called SunOS, and the addition of network services like NIS and NFS and the X Window system makes up Solaris which is numbered 2.x following SunOS 5.x up until 2.6. After that Sun dropped the "2." to lessen the confusion and just called it Solaris 7 (based on SunOS 5.7). From Solaris 8 it started to contain more and more open source software to make it easier on the sysadmin. Solaris 9 comes with OpenSSH, bash, Apache, Sendmail, BIND, gzip(1), zip, logrotate and most other stuff we used to add.

Linux has copied many of the features of the Solaris kernel and user-space, such as the style of dynamic linking (eg dlopen(3), ld.so, the LD_PRELOAD environment variable), NFS and RPC.

See the RosettaStone

Part of CategoryOperatingSystem