Seriously what is it even used for? like really 1337 people? And I think barely any programs support it and the interface looks kinda bad. What company makes this OS or does it have a similar setup **(Like production wise)** as Cosmos?

1) UNIX.
2) UNIX.
3) UNIX programs.
4) Sun, now Oracle.
5) Source code is mainly written in C, like UNIX.

Merp.

Kenneth, you're becoming too lenient :/
I haven't used Solaris since 2008/2009, I wonder how much it has changed.
Anyway, a quick Google came up with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)
Search before asking, it's forum/internet etiquette.

Oh, I didn't even think about that... thanks

Solaris is more so for specific applications... Just as MS Office is to Windows, things like Oracle, SolarWinds, CiscoWorks etc... Not to mention java works so much better on Solaris (net beans and friends...) Although the SPARC stuff has really priced it out of the world, just like Oracle...

Before SUN was bought out by Oracle, Solaris 10 was a nice free UNIX as it was REAL unix, and things just worked.. there wasn't all these variations of what to run, flash for solaris just worked, you didn't have tweak to any distro or deal with whatever packaging... But Oracle doesn't do anyone any favors...

Basically when you spend 100k++++ on an application (Oracle Ebusiness can be a few million) you end up just running it on the vendor choice platform, and with Oracle anything its always been SUN Hardware/Software... The average user couldn't/wouldn't care less, and OpenWindows, NEWS & Motif never really went anywhere so... there you go.

I had my first experience with Solaris on a Sparc Classic (one of those small cubes) with Solaris 2.4. Actually, when I got it, it was running 2.6 but since the machine could not cope with larger amounts of main memory and it was very slow the way it was, I took the gamble to reinstall the machine with 2.4. Oh, good-old OpenWindows

In those days (must have been around 2000) porting stuff from Linux was still rather easy as there was still plenty of software not depending on those huge frameworks on which today's desktop environments are based. I had some fun getting my favorite tools compile and then use the box as a mail terminal (it had one of those nice and very large - and heavy! - tube screens). I still regret having had to sell it at a time when I needed every single penny..

I love this form factor, too. The sun4c and sun4m members in my collection are SPARCstation IPC and SPARCclassic.
it's a pity they dropped the form factor and never built machines faster than 50MHz microSPARC I

Note: you can indeed run Solaris 9 on a Classic, it only took 14h on mine to install

I tried Solaris, and it ran good. It was useful for accessing sensitive websites, such as banking.

Now the modern opensolaris is much usefull than old releases.

Um how so?

If you want OpenWindows, try getting Solaris 8 which is last version that ships it.

I still run Solaris/x86 versions - 2.5.1 and 2.4 through virtualbox. I was searching for C compilers or any precompiled release of gcc, but without success.

Never really used Solaris, but I think it's also used in thin client terminals, also sold by Sun Microsystems... I ran across them on eBay, they come up on sale for fairly cheap...

About how cheap? And yes I will be testing Solaris on a VM here sometime in the future.

normally SUNWcc should come with distribution disks?

For about 30-40 bucks in used condition, you can find one right here (though they may come up for cheaper), and here's the datasheet.

Since Solaris 2.x the compilers were unbundled from the OS. cc was available, but it only gives an error because of the missing backends.

There once were "abandonware" licenses handed out for free for legacy WorkShop releases (namely 3 and 5), but I doubt that this offer still stands from Oracle

What do you think is the minimum requirements to run Solaris in a VM?

never thought about this, I always give my VMs plenty of RAM to run as smooth as possible, although running Solaris 2.4, 128mb can already be considered plenty

Same here, I know it's not necessary, but I gave my Windows 8 Consumer Preview VM'ed 4GB of ram and two of my cores.

i think any recent PC will be able to get Solaris working, even version 11 came out recently last year.
and for your information VirtualBox-ready appliances from Oracle are respectively 1000 and 1536 MB for version 11 and 10(sic!), by default.
i must say desktop experience probably won't be the smoothest possible(but quite usable anyway), after all these aren't lightweight OSes.
not really a problem, 'cause in Solaris you get most of the fun from the console you won't care too much...
uh, don't know which emulator are you going to use, but probably you'll have similar problems(and maybe a little worse) even with older versions like 2.x... you know, compatibility with emulated graphic cards usually is not too good.
for example, Solaris 2.5 on VirtualBox: all i got is a crappy 640x480 OpenWindows session, also quite laggy.

Version eleven is the most recent version correct?

yep, it came out just last november... a really nice one...

SPARC-based Sun-Workstations were so widespread, that they can be aquired for very few bucks right now. I'd recommend getting one for everyone interested in Solaris, they are some fine boxes I have three of them myself.

yeah, i'd definitely enjoy a Sun workstation!
can i ask you which SPARC-boxes do you own and which version of Solaris do you run on them?