18 Facts About Solaris Unix

Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Solaris Unix superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, and for originating many innovative features such as DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider.

Solaris Unix is developed under a proprietary development model, and only the source for open-source components of Solaris Unix 11 is available for download from Oracle.

Solaris Unix has a reputation for being well-suited to symmetric multiprocessing, supporting a large number of CPUs.

Solaris Unix can be installed from various pre-packaged software groups, ranging from a minimalistic Reduced Network Support to a complete Entire Plus OEM.

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Installation of Solaris Unix is not necessary for an individual to use the system.

Solaris Unix can be installed from physical media or a network for use on a desktop or server, or be used without installing on a desktop or server.

Early releases of Solaris Unix used OpenWindows as the standard desktop environment.

Sun and other Solaris Unix vendors created an industry alliance to standardize Solaris Unix desktops.

Solaris Unix 10 includes Sun's Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME and comes with a large set of applications, including StarOffice, Sun's office suite.

Versions up to 2005, Solaris Unix was licensed under a license that permitted a customer to buy licenses in bulk, and install the software on any machine up to a maximum number.

When Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010, the OpenSolaris Unix project was discontinued after the board became unhappy with Oracle's stance on the project.

In March 2010, the previously freely available Solaris Unix 10 was placed under a restrictive license that limited the use, modification and redistribution of the operating system.

When Solaris Unix is used without a support contract it can be upgraded to each new "point release"; however, a support contract is required for access to patches and updates that are released monthly.

Each version such as Solaris Unix 10 is based on a snapshot of this development codebase, taken near the time of its release, which is then maintained as a derived project.

SXCE releases terminated with build 130 and OpenSolaris Unix releases terminated with build 134 a few weeks later.

The next release of OpenSolaris Unix based on build 134 was due in March 2010, but it was never fully released, though the packages were made available on the package repository.

Solaris Unix 10 provides a flexible background for securely dividing system resources, providing performance guarantees and tracking usage for these containers.