OS wars and Solaris

With the delayed release of Longhorn and Novell’s recent announcement of Novell Linux, based on its earlier purchase of German Linux developer SuSE, the OS wars are reaching new heights.

One of the most praised and popular operating systems a couple of years ago, Solaris started to fade out of the scene when Sun became more interested in Linux than supporting its own OS. A real pity, since Solaris was a nicely designed modern operating system, had better security features than many other commercial solutions and benefited from coherent updates from its developers.

From this point of view, we salute Sun’s initiative to revive Solaris and freely distribute version 10 for x86 and SPARC machines, hence rejoining the OS wars with a fresh, new approach!

Of course, Solaris is no longer such a strong presence on the Unix OS market – Linux is getting better every day, has likely more ports than any other OS out there. Distributions such as Fedora Core 3 benefit from easy and straightforward updates with a mouse click. How will the new Solaris 10 work on today’s market cannot be guessed at this stage of the story.

Discovered in 2001, ‘Sadmind’ (aliases: SunOS/BoxPoison, Solaris/Sadmind.worm)is still the only known Solaris worm at the moment. You can find a description of Sadmind, in our Virus Encyclopedia.