Adding Software with pkgutil

The best way by far that I have found for adding free software to use pkgutil. The pkgutil program is a replacement for the pkg-get program which is a Solaris update program loosely based on apt-get. It loads software as .pkg files which means that the normal Solaris commands pkgadd, pkgrm, and pkginfo work with them the same as packages from Sun. All files are loaded into /opt/csw (bin for the binaries). The site http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/ has instructions for getting pkgutil set up.
 
Here is a critical excerpt from the page:

# pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now

# wget http://mirror.opencsw.org/opencsw/pkgutil.pkg
# pkgadd -d pkgutil.pkg

I have used it with Solaris versions 8, 9, and 10 and Solaris 10 x86. It works with some older versions of Solaris too.

To get started with Solaris 10 you can use the pkgadd command shown above. However you need a copy of wget to get started with Solaris 8 and 9. There are various places to get stand alone versions of wget on the web. To keep things simple, here is wget.sparc and wget.i386. Save the appropriate one to your machine and make them executable. After pkgutil is set up, you can use pkgutil -i wget to get a maintained copy of wget.

I was using pkg-get and now it won't work!

The pkg-get program has been replaced by pkgutil. That's all well and good, but what do I do now?

I found that running the following two commands to get rid of the old stuff and then installing pkgutil as shown above worked for me.
 
pkgrm CSWpkgutil
pkgrm CSWpkgget

After reinstalling pkgutil, running
pkgutil -U
pkgutil -u
gets things up to snuff.

Proxy Servers

If you are in a corporate environment, you may have a proxy server between you and the Internet. pkg-util works with proxys and picks up the proxy information from your proxy environment variables:

1. System Environment
   http_proxy="http://my.proxy.com:8000"
   ftp_proxy="http://my.proxy.com:8000"
   no_proxy="127.0.0.1,localhost
   export http_proxy ftp_proxy no_proxy
   Put these lines in your $HOME/.profile or /etc/profile replacing my.proxy.com:8000 with the name and port of your proxy server.
    

If you are not behind a proxy, say you are setting this up at home, you can ignore the proxy server setup.

Refresh Catalog and Update

It is always a good idea to refresh the catalog before you do adds or updates.
 
pkgutil -U
The above command refreshes the catalog.
 
pkgutil -u
The above command brings all the CSW packages you have loaded up to date.

What to Load?

What you load is of course up to you and depends upon what you might want to do with the machine. Here are a few things I like to load.

• pkgutil -i gcc3
  This is the gcc compiler (release 3). You can also get gcc4 and gcc2.
   
• pkgutil -i gdb
  This is the debugger for gcc. If you are going to sling code, you probably will need it.
   
• pkgutil -i ddd
  This is a GUI interface to gdb. I personnally like it for debugging C code.
   
• pkgutil -i lsof
  Loads lsof which lists all the open files.
   
• pkgutil -i ggrep
  This is the GNU grep as found on Linux systems. In includes the -r option which the Solaris grep does not have.
   
• pkgutil -i wireshark
  Wireshark (formerly known as ethereal) is useful for watching network traffic.
   
• pkgutil -i firefox
  firefox this is a good web browser
   
• pkgutil -i openofficeenus
  This gets the version of Open Office for the English (en) in United States (us) locale. There are a bunch of other local's available
   
• pkgutil -i vncviewer
  pkgutil -i vncserver
  This gives you VNC access to and from your machine.
   
• pkgutil -i openssh # Use on Solaris 8
  This gives you ssh capabilites. The start stop scripts are installed. While Solaris 10 uses /etc/ssh, the config files are in /opt/csw/etc/ssh.
   
• pkgutil -a | grep whatever
  The pkg-get -a command gets a list of available packages. You can grep for stuff you might want.