Solaris Operating Environment

Solaris Operating Environment (OE), usually just referred to as Solaris, is the name of a computer operating system by Sun Microsystems. It is a UNIX dialect.

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 (and earlier versions were retroactively named Solaris 1.x). After version 2.6, Sun began to drop the "2." from the name; the most recent versions (as of early 2002) are Solaris 7 and the 64-bit Solaris 8. The Solaris 9 Operating Environment was released 22 May 2002.

Solaris has a reputation for being extremely stable and powerful.

Other Useful Things To Know About Solaris

• Built to run on Sun SPARC Processors which use RISC
• More recent versions of Solaris can run on Intel processors
• Solaris is not open source, but they do have free-to-use versions for single processor systems

• http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/ - Official site.