Solaris Designs Tutorial : This article explains why developers should make Solaris their primary development and deployment platform, and also explains how to develop software on the Solaris OS. This article assumes that C will be used as the programming language of choice, although much of the information is relevant to other high-level languages.

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Introduction

Since the availability of the Solaris 10 Operating System in January 2005, its popularity (using the number of registered users as a yardstick) has exploded: As of August 2006, in excess of 5 million copies were registered, more than all of the previous versions of the Solaris OS combined. Further fueling this frenzy was the release of OpenSolaris in June 2005. Given this surge in the number of users, more developers (commercial and open-source alike) are seeing the Solaris platform as a viable target for their software. This article explains why developers should make Solaris their primary development and deployment platform, and also explains how to develop software on the Solaris OS.

This article assumes that C will be used as the programming language of choice, although much of the information is relevant to other high-level languages. The discussion is aimed at two kinds of people:

• Non-developers who just want to build their favorite (perhaps open-source) software on the Solaris platform
  
• Developers (commercial and otherwise) who are porting their code to the Solaris OS (or are considering doing so)