Solaris 10 Operating System

Introduction to Solaris 10

Solaris 10 is operating system from Sun Microsystems known for its stability and security features. Many have declared it as the most advanced operating system on the planet.

Solaris 10 has some unique features which are not found on any operating systems or if they are they exist in a very primitive stage. What I found the most notable, about Solaris 10 in particular and Sun in general is that the source code of Solaris 10 is available to be downloaded free of cost . So it is perfectly possible to customize and extend the operating system. Some engineers at Bangalore, India did just that. They took the Solaris kernel and molded it so that it could live on a LIVE CD and could be booted off that cd. What resulted was an open source implementation of Solaris poplarly known as Belenix.

The world at Sun is full of such marvelous stories where everyone is ready to customize the software according to his own needs. This is the true power of opensource software. Opensource software gives the power in your hands and not to some Software Giant which creates only proprietary software. Solaris is just that. Solaris has its origin in Unix operating system. And it incorporates many features of the Unix operating system. Most notable are the shells like bash shell, korn shell etc. And there are many features which Solaris 10 shares with Linux and Unix.

Solaris 10 is gaining popularity day by day. Opensolaris is another derivative of Solaris which has a buzzing developer community of its own.

Solaris 10 has some of the most competitive features found in the operating systems and it is an inspiration to other companies in the field of development of operating systems. For example, there a feature Solaris Container in this operating system which natively supports virtualization. This is terrific. The reason being Microsoft is going to have the same feature only in its next release of operating system called Windows 7.

DTrace also known as dynamic tracing is another feature that helps system administrators to identify the causes of performance degradation of system if there is any.

Platform dependency is the most limiting factor in deciding upon the right operating systems. Solaris 10 is supported on hundreds of x86 and SPARC platforms. Thousands of applications are built for this operating system. One of the most useful application I find is OpenOffice which is a very decent office suite and competes with Microsoft Office.

Security is the feature which Solaris 10 can boast of. This is the reason why the whole infrastructure of some big banks and online retail stores is based on this monster. It is estimated that Sun invested more than 500 million US Dollars into development the development of this fantastic operating system.

One last word , Solaris operating system is free. Can you believe it ? World's most advanced operating system is free. You can download it from Sun's site.