on thu aug NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERpm NUMBER fergal moran mentioned in a nutshell solaris is suns own flavour of unix though i m sure that this nice person would like a bit more detail solaris is quite different to linux though these days you can make solaris act a lot like linux with an extra cd of gnu tools sun ship with solaris it is based on the sysv unix family so it s quite similar to other unixen like hpux and sco sun s hardware in general is more reliable and a lot more expensive one of the main bonuses you get by buying sun is that you are getting your hardware and software from one company so if you have a support contract they have to fix it they can t fob you off with that s a software problem talk to the software vendor etc if you are set on linux you most likely can do your own support there is then a world of different hardware options you can run linux on sparc though some companies like redhat don t maintain a sparc port anymore you can also buy your machine from linux oriented companies like dnuk who do machines designed to run linux and their own version of linux that has a few extras for their machines or you can get a machine from a cheaper company like dell and it ll most likely work most of the time john irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 