Solaris Operating Environment: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Solaris Operating Environment (OE) (Solaris) is a computer operating system, the proprietary Unix variant developed by Sun Microsystems.

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. Earlier versions were retroactively named Solaris 1.x. After version 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name; the most recent versions (as of early 2002) are Solaris 7, the 64-bit Solaris 8, and Solaris 9 which was released 22 May 2002.

Solaris is primarily written to run on SPARC processors. There is also a version called Solaris-x86 that runs on PCs. Solaris 10 is expected to be available for AMD64 as well as SPARC and x86 when it is released in December 2004.

Solaris is proprietary rather than open source, but both binary and source versions have been freely downloadable at various times. Sun have recently confirmed their intention to make Solaris open source, but details have not been finalized yet.