Oracle Corp. has rekindled its Solaris love. Sun's Solaris operating system will underlie new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack. And Oracle EnterpriseLinux now becomes the preferred OS for lower-end commodity hardware.

Recent changes to Solaris licensing could further encourage Solaris 10 users to consider Linux -- and result in fewer new users considering Solaris at all. If you're a Solaris customer, don't overlook this license change.

An internal Oracle memo that was released last week provides a detailed summary of the company's plans for the Solaris operating system, which Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun. The memo offers a mix of good and bad news for Solaris enthusiasts.

Back in August we shared that Sun would be discontinuing SXCE, or formally known as Solaris Express Community Edition.

Hot on the heels of acquiring Sun, Oracle has changed the license for Solaris making it non-free once again. In a time like this, such a move can only be fatal and of course ultimately beneficial to Linux.

If you use Solaris or Solaris Express, you may want to also use Wine to install Windows programs. There are few ways, but I will write about my favorite - one that uses SFE repository, which enables you to use other fantastic open source programs not packaged for Solaris yet.

For this article we have taken NVIDIA's latest display driver for Linux and Solaris (v100.14.11) and ran it on both operating systems. Specifically, we had used Fedora 7 with the Linux 2.6.21 kernel and on the Solaris side had used both Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 and Solaris Express Community Edition Build 66 "Nevada".

CrossOver for Solaris is a commercial variant of Wine released by CodeWeavers with (currently) limited support for many of todays most popular office application and games. CrossOver Office and Games for Solaris has been compiled on Solaris 10 and tested for performance and stability

I have come across Solaris a few times. Sun makes its own Unix operating system, called Solaris. I have heard and read many good things about Solaris, especially on Sun hardware and in big enterprise environments.