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.

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.

If you want to know what Oracle's roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris - aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters - is going to take some time. Oracle's plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.

Oracle has announced it is purchasing Sun Microsystems for just over $7 billion. The official word from Oracle is that the purchase gives it two key assets - Java and Solaris - but open sourcerers will understandably be more interested in MySQL and OpenOffice.org.

Sometimes, Google's search engine does a better job of telling us about IT vendors than the vendors' own public relations and marketing machines. So it is with the next commercial and development iterations of Oracle's Solaris Unix operating system.

Now that the Sun acquisition is a done deal, Oracle has begun picking and choosing the products that will live on and which will fade out. While CEO Larry Ellison was adamant that there would be no wholesale slaughter of products or staffing cuts, the reality is that not everything can survive or receive full Oracle investment.

Oracle and Sun Microsystems announced, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4B Deal with lot of major software products including Java and Solaris.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun raised a lot of questions about the future of Sun's core technologies. Oracle says that it is committed to Solaris and Java, but some open source advocates are concerned about the implications for OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Ars looks at how Oracle and members of the open source software community have responded to the acquisition.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is pretty darn confident the European Union will soon approve Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems and MySQL. Still skeptical? Ellison is planning a big announcement on January 27. Here are the details.