[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“When we think of free operating systems we tend to
think overwhelmingly of the big hitters (all GNU/Linux) like
Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva and then of those niche distros
that have been designed for low end systems or for specialist
purposes like security and forensics. But Oranges are not the only
fruit. There is a hinterland out there called Unixland, populated
by other less well known systems whose roots are firmly Unix too.
BSD for example, famed for its rock-like security. OpenSolaris is
another one, perhaps less well known, but it has features that are
well worth a punt. This article will look at those kernels and if
porting them to mainstream distros is technically possible and
permissible in terms of the perrenially thorny issue of licencing.“An OS with pedigree
“OpenSolaris is an operating system with its roots in Sun’s
Solaris (though they have been taken over by Oracle). This
symbiosis is similar to the relationships between Fedora/Redhat and
SUSE/OpenSuse. Initially, Sun software was tied to the SPARC
platform but with the advent of OpenSolaris, the kernel was made
available for the X86 architecture too. Think Sun and you tend to
think Servers, but when they hired Ian Murdock (the founder of
Debian) in 2007 they signaled that they were serious about
OpenSolaris on the desktop. He duly produced a friendly and very
familiar Gnome-based desktop (and many other community-based
versions) which could be booted as a live CD with the option to
install to a hard drive.”