Solaris

Solaris is an Unix operating system of the company Sun Microsystems.

History and versions

First Sun SunOS, a BSD Unixvariant, developed which was extended in the course of the years by many characteristics by system V. 1982 appeared the version 1.0 of this operating system for at that time still the Sun1 and Sun2-Rechner based on Motorola 68010. The Sun4-Baureihe with SPARC Prozessorarchitektur, developed later by Sun, made SunOS further popular, and finally SunOS 4.1.1_U1 was last official release, which supported still computers of the Sun3-Baureihe with Motorola 68000er. The last SunOS-4-Version of 1995 was 4.1.4 and brought apart from error clearing still support for the machines with MicroSPARC processor.
The not very successful series Sun386 with Intel processors were supported by SunOS in the versions 4.0.1 to 4.0.3. With version 4.1.2 support for the multi-processor enterprise (asymmetrical) was introduced.

The version 5 of SunOS was again developed on basis by system V release 4, after Sun had become partner of Unix international. It was bundled with the graphic user surface CDE and Java and marketed starting from 1992 as `operating Environment' Solaris 2.x. It was from the outset SMP able.

The early versions of Solaris, which were based still on SunOS version 4, were nummeriert in later years than version 1.x. After version 2.6 the “2 became.” omitted: In the year 2004 the current version is 10 (SunOS 5,10), which one can download since February 2005 free of charge with Sun.

Functions and characteristics

Since the version Solaris 7 (SunOS 5,7) offers Solaris on UltraSPARC CCUs a constant 64-Bit-Unterstützung. Solaris is available also in a x86er-Prozessor-Version, whatever offers since version 10 64-Bit-Unterstützung for AMD64-CPUs. The Solaris version for PowerPC was again stopped after first release (Solaris 2.5.1) first.

Since January 2005 exists the OpenSolaris project, that, under the direction of Sun, the source code of Solaris under the Common development and distribution License of the public makes available to a large extent. Under the name OpenSolaris were then released the Sourcen for Kernel, individual modules and libraries on 14 June 2005 as open SOURCE operating system. In the framework its is to appear also a Solaris version for PowerPC, which at present is in the context of the blowing commodity and/or OpenSolaris project in work. At the beginning of of 2006 was communicated by the developers an appropriate Portierung on the Pegasos based CHRP workstation “ODW” by IBM/Freescale/Genesi.

Software

The software under Solaris becomes mainly in the context of a package management with the help of the pkg programs (pkgadd, pkgrm, pkgchk…) administered.
Since Solaris is an Unix operating system, many programs, which e.g. run on other Unix or similar operating systems as Linux, on Solaris can be portiert. Thus makes available for example the Blastwave project with the support of Sun of hundreds of additional software packages for Solaris, which can be brought in with the program pkgadd. Available among other things the graphic surfaces CDE, XFCE, KDE and GNOMES, the Browser Firefox, are the GNU Textutils and other one.