Solaris is a proprietary UNIX-like operating system, 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.

Solaris consists of the SunOS UNIX base operating system plus a graphical user environment. Solaris is written in a platform-independent manner and is available for SPARC and x86 processors (including x86_64). Historically, Solaris used to be a proprietary operating system, however, starting from version 10, its licence has changed and the product is now distributed free of charge for any system or purpose, while its source code is available from OpenSolaris.org under a license approved by Open Source Initiative (OSI).

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· The new version builds on the core strengths of the Solaris 10 to help customers maximize asset usage and systems performance, manage datacenter complexity, preserve business continuity and reduce costs. Solaris 10 10/08 includes numerous product updates and enhancements, several of which were done through the OpenSolaris community. New features in Solaris 10 10/08: the ZFS file system has been enhanced with recent work from the OpenSolaris community; Solaris 10's virtualization technologies, such as Solaris Containers, have been enhanced with new features; Sun and Intel continue to collaborate to help ensure Solaris 10 will support Intel's latest Intel Xeon processor line.