Blastwave.Org

This very young project is growing with every day, hoping to eventually win over the good old SunFreeware.

Currently the guys from Blastwave are already complaining their archive growing over the size of a standard DVD-R:

878 Software Packages on Tue Nov 16 11:21:30 EST 2004

4.490644454 GB of Solaris Software

In general, I prefer compile most of the software I use myself - but sometimes you just don't have the time for this, and then such sites might come in very handy.

This is a non-commercial project, all the packages provided are compiled from Open Source projects, and lots of project supports work for Sun Microsystems.

The site has, in my view, a better structure, than SunFreeware, and what really pleased me is that for every package there is a way to report errors and problems - a maintainer will look through them and fix the issue. Everyone can browse the bug list relater to any given package. Also, you can easily browse the list of all the dependancies a package has, and you're offered links to the appropriate packages off BlastWave itself.

All the installed packages are conveniently put into /opt/csw.

In overall, my first impressions are positive. Just yesterday I've downloade and installed MPlayer, and everything works just fine - the package itself along with all the dependancies took just 15 minutes to install... Later I'll probably compile mplayer myself, but this time I urgently needed to show one guy a DivX video, so the Blastwave solution lookedreally attractive :)