I am trying out OpenSolaris right now in a VM

[Lord Xeb]

what is solaris used for anyway?

[aeiah]

same sorta thing as other unix-esque operating systems i would imagine. id also imagine its not too different on the surface from linux. they have Ian Murdock doing some linuxy things for open solaris right now. ian being one half of debian, a distro we can all thank :)

but yea solaris can run on massive mainframes and obviously the sparc cpus, and the x86 version can run native linux stuff. so its really just another competitor in the large server market

[cardinals_fan]

OpenSolaris is a new OS with support from Sun that is open source and has some neat features. Unfortunately, it also has rather bad hardware support. Solaris 10 is an exceedingly stable OS (officially supported by Sun) that is often used in enterprise settings.

[Lord Xeb]

Figured as much, that is why I am running it in a VM