Solaris

Solaris is a Unix operating system designed and developed by Sun Microsystems. It is commonly used as the main OS on Sun's own line of hardware, the so called Sparc stations, which is basicly their main line of business. You can see an example at the bottom of this page, that is my Blade 100 workstation. While Solaris really excels on Sun's own hardware they also have a version which can be used on the Intel platform.

Over the years Solaris has kept a rather low profile, Sun even seriously considered to stop supporting the Intel platform some years ago and instead fully focus on the Sparc version. This has lead to many protests from enthousiast Solaris users (myself included, even though I didn't actively use it at that time) and which I consider solid proof that Sun really does listen to its customers. Solaris' Intel edition is still with us, and bigger than ever. In fact, if it wasn't for the Intel version I honostly doubt that Solaris would have become as popular as it is now.

For me Solaris will always be something special since it marked the beginning of my Unix/Linux career. It all started with a Solaris training. But more on that at a later time.