[OpenIndiana-discuss] Newbie Questions - Installing various software

[Jan Owoc]

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 7:08 AM, Andrew Myers <lists at abmyers.com> wrote:
> I guess I'm a "newbie" although I've been using various Linux distro's for about 10 years.

I'm a "newbie" to OI just like you, but I can answer some (not all) of
your questions.


> Firstly, I wanted to have a later version of Firefox installed, and I did this by downloading 11.0 from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest/contrib/solaris_pkgadd/.  Is that the best way to upgrade?  Is 3.6.12 the most recent in the "official" repo?

Many of the packages (including the Firefox 3.6.12) are from when
OpenSolaris was still available. When it was forked to OpenIndiana,
the (limited) team of developers focused on packages that were
important to have a usable system. Since you found a build of Firefox
11 for Solaris, that means that it's possible to build Firefox 11 for
OI, and it hasn't been done because no one has done it (yet).


> Similarly I wanted a jdk installed.  I went to the Oracle download site, but the download for x64 is only 9.25MB.  This doesn't seem right to me.  How do you install JDK7 on OI?

If I recall correctly, to install Java x64 on Solaris you must first
install the 32-bit version. The former uses the same libraries
(written in Java) and merely swaps out the virtual machine. Does 81MB
+ 9MB sound about right?


> In the meantime I installed jdk 1.6 using the command  pfexec pkg install jdk.
>
> Next, I'd like to install Eclipse.  pkg search eclipse isn't showing me anything useful, and I can't find any solaris builds at eclipse.org.  Do they not exist, or am I looking in the wrong place?

Don't know. Sorry. I would assume you googled "eclipse solaris", found
this as the first hit, but it isn't what you want (?):
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7-201106131736/solPlatform.php


> I come from a Red Hat / Fedora background and I'm very used to installing most software using yum.  Is pkg comparable to this?  Or is the OI way more to download software individually and install it by hand?

It's analogous to what you'd have with Red Hat. You can have several
repositories with various policies for including packages (the
official one, the "Sun Freeware" one, the "I'm not afraid of software
patents" one, and random ones you may find throughout the Internet).
As with Red Hat, this is the "preferred" way to get software, as you
can update it all with two simple commands: "pkg refresh" "pkg
update".

As with Red Hat, specific software you want may be missing from the
repositories (or have the version of Firefox from when RHEL 5 was
originally released). You may be able to find ".pkg" files (the
equivalent of ".rpm") to install the software, registering it with the
package manager. In some cases, the only alternative is the ".tar.gz"
which may contain a prebuilt binary or even just the source code.


Jan