Sun is currently the number one server vendor in the US, but does not control the desktop market. Solaris is also traditionally an operating system that runs on Sun's own hardware, just as Mac OS runs on Apple hardware. The question here is, can Solaris 8 cut it in such a competitive desktop operating system market?

Sun has obviously taken a leaf out of the Linux book. Solaris 8 may not be under General Public License, but it is available as a freely downloadable 'personal' operating system, and what's more it runs on Intel hardware as well as Sparc, so users don't need a Sun workstation to run it. However, when it comes to installation, Solaris 8 is text based and long-winded, in the way that Linux distributions used to be before simplified graphical installations brought them up to date.

Once installed, Solaris 8 boots directly into a graphical environment (CDE), but it's fairly spartan in the default installation. For it to be useful, most users will want to download some extra software such as StarOffice, which is available from the Sun Web site. In the future, Sun plans to use the Gnome graphical environment that is currently available for Linux, and Linux programs compiled for the Intel platform will run on Solaris using a program called lxrun, so expect to see more commonality between Solaris and Linux in the future.

Nice though it is to see the renowned Solaris 8 available as a free download, it is more technically challenging than many Linux distributions on the market, and is perhaps best left to those with some prior experience of UNIX or those with a lot of time and patience.