All,

I would like to ask you for your suggestion concerning the best way to
install new packages.

1, Official Sun Solaris 10 CDs /DVD

I have several accompanies CDs (Solaris 10) downloaded from the official Sun web site and now I want to install a new app. So how do
I found the requested app on the CDs? Do I have to go manually through all of the CDs (ls ./Solaris_11/Product ) to find the requested app? How do I guess the real application name from the official naming
schema? Does somewhere exist a list of all apps on the CDs with description (link between Sun's names and apps' full names) and the
required dependencies? Does a tool exist, which can show list of all of the app on CDs in a more convenient way then going through all of
them with ls command?

2, Use sunfreeware.com (mirrors)

This looks really promising but installed gcc during compilation/linking says (stdio.h: No such file or directory). It looks like I am missing header files. How can I solve it? Do I have to install another package?
I
3, blastwave.com

This simulates the Debian apt-get approach. It works and even it tries
to solve dependencies. (I have got the some problem with gcc/g++ as
mentioned above). However it duplicates already originally installed
apps (it tried to install the perl app again). These duplications can be very unpleasant if you want to squeeze as much as space it is
possible and you have to after all solve the path problems (which app will be really called).

So, I tried to summarize all the ways how to install apps on Solaris I can think of and I would like to ask for your suggestions, experiences with each of them.

Thank you in advance
Poz.

You won't find the same packages in each of these sources, also, there are not three but five main different sources for Solaris software.

First you have the packages which are part of Solaris, their names start with SUNW, and they are installed in system directories. Some of these packages come from freewares, their binaries are in either /usr/bin or in /usr/sfw/bin. (sfw=Solaris Freewares), you can have a list of them in:
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/sfw/usr/src/cmd/
You update these packages either by updating the whole Solaris, or by applying Solaris patches.

Second you have freeware applications which are not part of Solaris, i.e. unsupported by Sun, but delivered as a convenience in the Solaris Companion CD, they are installed in /opt/sfw. For a list of the packages, log in there: http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/...nsactionId=try
You update these packages by uninstalling them and then installing a new version.
Their names starts with SFW.

Third, there is the independant sunfreeware.com site, which offer a lot of packages compiled for different versions of Solaris, they install in /usr/local, which is a violation of the SVR4 standard, and complexify sharing them within zones. Beyond that, they usually work fine, but are sometimes outdated compared to the next repository.
A list of packages available is there:
http://www.sunfreeware.com/programlistintel10.html
Their names starts with SMC (Steven M. Christensen).

Fourth is the also independant blastwave.org site, which installs its packages in /opt/csw which is right, but which has the host dependant and log files there too, which is a SVR4 violation. Blastwave is also ignoring already installed Solaris packages (except the core ones), so one common complaint is that it often duplicates software already there. The positive side of that is that dependencies are easier to maintain from a blastwave point of view. Blastwave is a huge success primarily because of its pkg-get use, which ease both installation, dependancy management and update, although this tool is not specific to it, and can be used with sunfreeware too.

A list of blastwave packages is at http://www.blastwave.org/packages.php
Their names starts with CSW (Clarke Software)

Fifth are the unpackaged freewares built from source code. One main issue is that they usually follow the Linux convention of using /usr/local as their installation directory, which both violates SVR4 standard and clash with Sunfreeware packages.


Last point, for dependancy management and various queries on Solaris packages, there is an interesting tool, spc.ksh,recently published there http://blogs.sun.com/gbrunett/entry/...kage_companion

About my personal experience with them, I tend to use several packages from all of these sources, and others on the machine I administrate.

It is true it is not optimized in term of disk space, but hard disks are quite cheap nowadays, so I just buy a bigger disk from time to time ...