BANGALORE, INDIA: The Solaris Operating System doesn't need any introduction. It's one of the most popular UNIX-based operating systems developed by Sun Microsystems for its SPARC platform as well as the x86 and x86-64 based workstations and servers. Solaris 10 was released in early 2005, and has undergone many upgrades since then.

Starting this month, we'll take you through the world of Solaris and how to make the most of it. We'll start with a features overview and and how to install and get started with Solaris on the x86 platform. In later issues, we'll delve deeper into the key features, and how to configure and use them.

Key features
Compared to previous releases, many significant improvements have been brought in Solaris 10 in networking, data management, and installation. Plus, there are many components in it that you'll not find in most other Operating Systems. Here's a quick overview of those features:

Solaris Dynamic Tracing: short for DTrace, the feature helps developers debug applications in realtime, and one doesn't need to reboot the system to start the process.

Solaris Containers: These allow each application in Solaris to run in an isolated environment just like the usual 'Application virtualization' concept.

Solaris installation menu allows you to choose from a graphical installation or a manual step-by-step, or a simple command line based installation

Predictive Self Healing: A feature with which the system recovers itself automatically in case of any fault in software or hardware.

Solaris Zettabyte File System: ZFS is the file system in Solaris 10, which has many good features like an end-to-end checksum for all data, better performance, higher scalability, and much more.

Solaris Trusted Extensions: A new feature in Solaris 10, which separates data security policies from data ownership.