Concept in Definition ABC

Within the extensive family of UNIX systems, there are some proper names that have entered the terrain of legend, that have been and / or are true references for lovers of the technology.

This is the case of Solaris, the UNIX developed by Sun Microsystems and, since it was bought by Oracle, its development has continued under the leadership of the company founded by Larry Ellison.

The history of Solaris dates back to 1983, the date of publication of the first version of SunOS, as it was called then, based on the BSD version of Unix although little by little, it was incorporating elements of System V until it was based on said standard in its Solaris 2 version, published in 1992 and which led to the change of nomenclature, leaving SunOS as the name of the core.

From the beginning, Solaris has been available for the architecturehardware SPARC developed by Sun Microsystems itself in the mid-eighties and based on RISC, as well as x86 and x86-64, with a short-lived port to the PowerPC architecture.

Initially, Solaris' focus was on server and high-performance computing, although at one point Sun did not give up its use as a desktop environment.

For this, and to popularize this operating system among end users, also likely to bet on GNU / Linux, what Sun did was open its code source in 2005 under a free license, and its development to a community, as several other projects had already done.

This resulted in draft OpenSolaris, which Sun drew on to create the commercial paid Solaris, adding some homegrown elements to it.

After reaching the hands of Oracle, this company immediately closed the OpenSolaris project, and changed the license to use the system.

Currently, Solaris can be downloaded for free from the Oracle website, but used for non-commercial purposes only.

That time has left in inheritance some platforms, like Illumos, or OpenIndiana.

Thanks to Solaris, we can count on other tools of software that have exceeded the framework of this UNIX platform, being in some cases ported to other systems, such as DTrace, Solaris containers, or the ZFS file system.

The history of Solaris can also be seen in the graphical environments that it has been using throughout the time, like the very spartan OpenWindows, going to CDE and then to GNOME, which is the one that uses at the moment. However, it is also capable of compiling and running alternatives such as KDE and Xfce.

What reasons can we have for choosing Solaris as our operating system platform? Basically, the safety, robustness and reliability, and that it has all the software that we may require for our computer.

Photos: Fotolia - Lorelyn Medina / Dervish15