Solaris?

[mart_man00]

What do you think of Solaris?

Ive only heard about it being phased out, not phased in. Is there any reason for that? Is it alright for a server? Desktop? BSD or Linux like?

Ive been trying to play with alittle bit of everything lateley. Sometimes for fun other times becuase of OS seems to dominant in a category(or did). Solaris any good?

Im wondering downloading will take awhile. Any one know of a good place for it? Do you know of a older version that free(i mean no limitations from Sun about time/usage, not warez)?

Thanks

[sharth]

sun solaris costs money on the x86 platform ( 20 us dollars), however, it is free on the sparc platform.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html#x86

[chort]

Solaris is a commercial platform. All the Solaris software packages are distributed as binary, so you can't modify the source. Traditionally it has been very stable and enjoyed a lot of application support from numerous vendors.

Lately companies have been moving away from Solaris and Sun hardware to Linux on Intel hardware because it's much cheaper. Sun, however believe they're doing very well and continue to preach the virtues of Java and web-enabled services. It remains to be seen whether the cheap hardware/free OS model will win over dedicated hardware and binary packages approach.