UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi

I was reading some weblog on the internet and someone made an interesting statement.
<quote>
Linux is kernel and solaris is operating system
</quote>

Honestly I don't understand the difference between term kernel and operating system in above quote.

Could you explain me more ?

thx for help.

Red Hat, Ubuntu, Slackware and the likes are operating systems. Linux is the kernel they share.

Ok but waht is the difference between "operating system" vs "kernel".
What makes an operating system ??

An operating system, at least a Unix like one, is made of a kernel which interfaces the hardware, a C library, the libc which interfaces the kernel and the userland, standard utilities and libraries and and a set of applications usually including a graphic environment.

Linux is the kernel
Gnu/Linux is a very minimal Unix like OS that almost all Linux distributions are leveraging on.
Distributions includes in addition to Gnu/Linux, things like KDE or Gnome, Firefox, Apache, MySQL, package management, whatever.

Solaris is then similar to a Linux distribution. It includes a kernel (SunOS 5.x), libraries, utilities, one or more graphic environments, applications, etc ...

Linux is nothing but a 5-megabyte file that the bootloader loads on startup. It's capable of running applications but doesn't have any. Everything else, everything, is whatever applications distribution X wanted to bundle with it or user Y arranged to have installed. So the kernel amounts to a utility for running other programs.

Solaris a package deal, kernel and applications and everything. So is any Linux distribution, though Linux doesn't really belong to any distribution the way Solaris does to Sun/Oracle.