ask | dr. root

Well, at present yes and no...

If you are running Solaris 10 on an x86 system, there is a freely downloadable utility called "lxrun" that allows you to run Linux applications on the Solaris Operating Environment, Intel platform edition. Applications you can run with lxrun range from browsers and office productivity tools to graphic-intensive applications and games -- e.g. Applix, GIMP, GNOME, Netscape Communicator, Myth II and WordPerfect.

lxrun is available from:

- http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~steven/lxrun/
- http://www.sunfreeware.com

The next version of Solaris 10 is expected to include Solaris Containers for Linux Applications (SCLA). which will allow Linux applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10.

SCLA uses BrandZ (or Brand Zones) technology -- the underlying framework that allows to create Linux zones, as well as other non-native zones, on a machine running the Solaris Operating System. You could have a Red Hat zone, a Debian zone and a SuSE zone all running on the same Solaris 10 system.

But BrandZ technology is not limited to running Linux zones. It could also be used to develop brands that support a FreeBSD zone, a Darwin x86 zone, or Solaris zones that contain non-standard software collections.

BrandZ is the engineering project behind Solaris Containers for Linux Applications and it is already available today in the form of a development preview via OpenSolaris. You can download the latest source code and binaries to test-drive this technology from opensolaris.org.

The BrandZ infrastructure will eventually be available for both x86/x64 and SPARC systems, but SCLA is only expected to run on x86/x64-based systems running Solaris 10 in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode.