OpenSolaris Lives

The OpenSolaris Project is alive. Ashlee Vance provides the most intelligent summary of the project that I've read. Something cool you can do immediately is browse the source using a Web front-end to CVS. This is really useful if you want to understand how the OS is assembled. A common criticism of this release is the lack of a downloadable .iso or similar distribution. You must start with Solaris Express: Community Release, Build 16 or newer, then follow the release notes. This is not as user-friendly as the new Fedora Core 4 release announced today. (Note on the announcement -- those Fedora/Red Hat people are so witty!)

I plan to try each once I get some free time.

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Blastwave: Open Source Solaris Package Management System

I was looking to upgrade a few packages installed from Sunfreeware.com when I stumbled upon Blastwave.org. Blastwave.org is a "community software" (CSW) site which emulates the Debian apt-get system for installing Solaris packages.

Once you install the pkg-get package, you can install Solaris software as easily as this:

pkg-get install mutt

Pkg-get installs the dependencies and the desired package. The executable's home is /opt/csw/bin, unlike /usr/local/bin for packages installed from Sunfreeware.com.

Here is a comparison of how mutt, from Blastwave.org, and OpenSSH, from Sunfreeware, appear to pkginfo:

bash-2.03$ pkginfo | grep mutt

system      CSWmutt              mutt - Command line email reader with IMAP and SSL support

bash-2.03$ pkginfo | grep ssh 

application SMCossh              openssh

Perusing the mailing list archive, it seems users are enthusiastic. I hope this project continues to improve and update its package selection.

Keep in mind that software installed from Sunfreeware is ignored by Blastwave.org. For example, installing mutt resulted in a second installation of OpenSSL:

bash-2.03$ pkginfo | grep ssh 

application SMCossh              openssh

bash-2.03$ pkginfo | grep ssl

system      CSWossl              openssl - OpenSSL Secure Sockets Layer lib and utilities

application SMCossl              openssl

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