UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,
Iam curious to know wat are the differences between a sun machine and a linux machine?( In terms of architecture,applications etc)

Thanks in advance

hi
I have never used a Solaris system. But as I know, Solaris is based on System UNIX ( BSD UNIX is the other type ). And it also runs on sparc platforms (you can run linux on a 386 platform)

Solaris feels like a mainframe OS. It's really sophisticated,
but somewhat mysterious. You can't casually reconfigure things
as easily as a Linux or BSD system. But it's *really* sophisticated.
Not much advantage for a home user, but if you're a bank,
or a military base, or a power plant, then it's the way
to go.
I run Solaris at home because no free OS's have been ported
to my main machine yet (Sparcserver-1000). I don't *like*
it, compared to the BSDs, but I definately respect it. It's
also the nicest commercial unix I've used. (Way better than
Irix or AIX, anyways.)

Solaris is a very high end commercial Unix. It is meant for running business applications, large databases like Oracle, and high end engineering graphics and other workstation apps like that. It isn't too appropriate for home use. It is overkill and also lacks some of the ease-of-use features that Linux offers.

If you are interested in learning about it download the free x86 version and give it a try, but if you're looking for your main OS to use I wouldn't suggest it for home.

If you want some details about their features go to www.sun.com. They are releasing Solaris 10 soon, so you can see lots of information about the features the new release will have. Some very interesting stuff like dtrace to watch the kernel as it runs for troubleshooting and performance purposes, zones which let you run completely independent instances of the OS on the same hardware concurrently, and lots of new security features.