Highlights

The Solaris Operating System is an ideal platform for today's heterogeneous compute environments. Solaris 10 interoperates with many other operating environments, including Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. In addition, Solaris 10 supports popular open source applications and supports open standards such as UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, and XML.

• Provides source and binary compatibility for Linux applications
• Interoperability with Microsoft Windows services
• Includes Perl, PHP, Python and other widely used scripting languages
• Includes Apache, Samba, sendmail, IP Filter, BIND, and other popular open source software
• Supports Java application development and deployment with J2EE and J2SE

Interoperability through Open Industry standards

Sun’s commitment to open systems stretches back over two decades and is evident in a number of ways. In the Solaris OS itself, TCP/IP and NFS allow communication and filesharing; the APIs and libraries are designed to be compatible with Open Source coding practices, and tools and utilities conform to a range of industry standards and protocols.

Familiarity for Linux users

Since the Solaris and linux operating systems share much common heritage, it is not surprising that they can easily be deployed side by side. Libraries such as Glib, zlib, and TCL/Tk; scripting and shell utilities such as Perl, Python, zsh, tcsh, and bash, and common user and administrative interfaces such as GNOME, KDE, and Webmin are found on both Solaris and Linux. Further, through Sun's move to open source the OS, users can now participate in community activity through opensolaris.org.

Binary application compatibility is available through Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. This technology allows x86 Linux applications to run seamlessly and unmodified on Solaris. Now customers can consolidate multiple environments onto a unified platform and leverage the reliability, scale, observability and manageability of Solaris, while preserving application compatibility with internally developed or off-the-shelf Linux applications.

• BigAdmin Article: Linux Interoperability

Interoperability with Microsoft Windows

Solaris offers a number of different features for interoperability with Microsoft Windows. Samba, which is integrated into Solaris, allows Sun clients and servers to interoperate with Active Directory and access file and print services in a Windows network.

Customers can now use Sun Ray virtual display clients and Sun Secure Global Desktop Software to remotely connect into virtualized and centralized instances of Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista. Both Sun Ray Server and Sun Global Desktop Software run on Solaris servers and use RDP to access Windows applications.

• More About the Sun and Microsoft Agreement
• Interoperability Datasheet

Java Interoperability

The Java revolution has changed how people think of interoperability by no longer tying application design to a specific platform. The Solaris 10 Operating System provides a rich set of features for Java development and deployment, including not one but two Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE Platform)-compliant application servers: the Sun Java Application Server and the open source Tomcat Java servlet engine. For developers, the Netbeans platform provides all the tools needed to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications.

• More Details About J2EE
• Netbeans Info

Infrastructure and Tools Software Environments

In addition to interoperability around the Java platform, Sun provides development and deployment environments that run across multiple operating systems.

Components of the Sun Java Enterprise System are also included with Solaris 10, introducing an end-to-end software system that can support all of your infrastructure service needs on both Solaris and Linux platforms. In addition, the Sun Studio 12 tools provide a common development environment for C/C++ and Fortran applications for programmers running either Solaris or Linux.