Summary

In this chapter, you began your Solaris certification journey by looking at a bit of UNIX history. Solaris has gone through many revisions, and Solaris 9 (SunOS 5.9) is based on the UNIX SVR4 standard. You then looked at some key new features of Solaris 9, which include Resource Manager, Volume Manager, Patch Manager, integrated iPlanet Directory Server, integrated Secure Shell, and installation features.

The middle part of this chapter presented some key concepts in Solaris. You looked at Sun's differentiation between an operating system and an operating environment. Kernels and processes, shells, daemons, file systems, and clients and servers were explored briefly.

Finally, this chapter indicated places where you can get help. No one will ever know everything, so it's important to be able to find useful information quickly. Besides, your main goal should be to understand the concepts, not remember esoteric commands. Some options for Solaris help include man pages, AnswerBook2, docs.sun.com, and this book.