[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“When I interviewed Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell last August,
he hinted at a blurring of the lines between Linux and Solaris, if
not an outright merger. Said Gingell: ‘Five years from now, when
all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what’s Solaris and
what’s Linux, and who’s going to care?’“So, while attending a recent chalk talk at Sun’s Burlington,
Mass., campus, my ears perked up when the company’s chief
technology officer Greg Papadopolous talked about how applications
designed to run on Red Hat Linux can run unmodified on the Intel
version of Sun’s Solaris x86.“As it turns out, this wasn’t the news I thought it was.
Binaries designed to run on Red Hat Linux don’t natively run on
Solaris x86 without some help–yet. Achieving this level of
compatibility requires a Linux emulator called Lxrun. Lxrun is an
open-source project that’s been around since 1997, and to which Sun
has contributed engineering resources in order to guarantee its
compatibility with Solaris x86. (Lxrun does not run on versions of
Solaris designed for the Sparc architecture.)…”