Ok I have searched the archives but I don't seem to have a satisfactory answer for my questions.

1, What are the differences between the two in terms of kernel (I'm used to /stand for all)
2, What hardware do they run on?
3, Are they both platforms?

A frustrated HP fan.

its a matter of versions.

SunOS is pre Ver4 (aka 2.4) iirc.

Solaris is ver 2.4-current.

here is an indept discussion on goodle groups about this very subject.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...com%26rnum%3D2

Hello,
The technical difference is that SunOS is the operating system, while Solaris is the "operating environment" including the OS plus some other stuff. In fact, if you install Solaris 9 on a Sun server then do uname -a the OS is reported as SunOS 5.9.

However everybody uses Solaris to mean the current version of Sun's operating system so that usage is fine too.

As far as the numbers go:
SunOS 4 was also called Solaris 1. This was still based on bsd Unix. When they switched to Solaris 2 they updated the major number for SunOS to 5. So for example Solaris 2.4 uses the SunOS 5.4 operating system while Solaris 8 uses SunOS5.8. Solaris 2/SunOS 5 on up are sysV based instead of bsd.

Note - There is no such thing as Solaris 2.7, 2.8 or 2.9. It is one of my pet peeves that people call it that, even lots of Sun techs do for some reason . . . Sun changed the naming scheme after Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7, 8, and 9 instead of following hte old 2.X nomenclature. This kinda makes sense, since each point release was a major release coming about 2 years apart on average. So having them all be 2.something was not too accurate.

Hope that wasn't too long winded, and hope it helps.

I just noticed I missed 2 major parts of your question.

As far as hardware, SunOS and Solaris are both designed for Sparc based hardware, but there are Solaris verisons for X86 PC architectures too.

I'm not sure what /stand is on a HP box, but I assume /kernel is what you'd be looking for in Solaris. There is a sparc and sparcv9 version, the sparcv9 is the 64 bit and sparc is 32 bit.

If I misunderstood what you're asking on that part, let me know what information you need and I'll try again.