Solaris

As I've mentioned already, a couple day ago I've installed Solaris Express 2/06 on my desktop. And while the system isn't tuned for the maximum comfort, I thought I'd write a few entries for those of you who have just started learning and using Solaris 10.

Today I'll explain how to use Blastwave. It is a wonderful repository of hundres of Solaris software packages, which is, probably, the most quick and hassle-free way of getting newsoftware installed on your system. The beauty of using Blastwave is that with every new package installed, all the additional components it needs to use get downloaded and installed automatically. Below I'm showing the first few steps needed to start using with Blastwave.

1) Packages storage
Create a directory where all the downloaded packages will be stored. It will be better if this directory is on a filesystem with plenty of space - it's hard to make any space usage predictions, but I believe a couple of available gigabytes would be useful.

WARNING: this directory is merely a storage for the packages. The software installed from these packages will reside in a different directory structure - under /opt/csw (read on).



2) pkg-get
This command line tool is all you're going to ever need to download, install or update your Blastwave packages. Before you do anything else, you have to download the package with this tool and get it installed. I'm not showing the standard output commands will give you. Here I'm only giving you the commands you may use.



At this stage you'll have a /opt/csw directory created, where all the installed software will be put. pkg-get is the first installed software, and the full path to this command will be /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get

3) Configuring pkg-get

To change configuration parameters of pkg-get you're going to edit the /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf file. These are the parameters you may want to change:

url - this specifies what mirror of the Blastwave repository we want to use.

For best results, visit the Blastwave Mirror Status page and select the mirror closest to you geographically.

In the pkg-get.conf file you have to find this:



and now edit the line to include your new mirror server, and not the default ibiblio.org. The closest one to me is heanet.ie:



WARNING: updating mirrors is a responsibility of their personnel, and not the Blastwave.org maintainers. Because of this, some of the official mirrors might not have all the latest changes of the main repository ibiblio.org. So, if something doesn't work, try changing this url parameter back.

UPDATED: for instance, heanet.ie didn't seem to have the Solaris 11 support - which is essentially what all the latest Solaris Express builds are. Because of his, pkg-get couldn't find the 5.11 catalog file for my Solaris version, so I had to get back to ibiblio.org, even though my access to it can some be really slow.

PKGADDFLAGS=-G - this line has to be uncommented if you don't want pkg-get trying to install new packages into any Solaris zones but the global one

PKGGET_DOWNLOAD
This parameter has to be changed to reflect the location of packages storage directory:



4) CSWcommon
This package has all the core files and directories pkg-get needs to begin with. This is also the necessary package to be installed as most of other Blastwave pacages depend on it.



5) That's it! Now you're ready to install any software packages from Blastwave!

Related links:
My first blog entry on Blastwave.org
The official and very thorough howto on Blastwave

At last! I've finally installed Solaris Express on my x86 desktop. Couldn't wait any longer - too many interesting things happening in the x86 world of Solaris these days! I'm still unfortunately working on a 32-bit box - the good old Pentium IV 3Ghz has served me few years without any problems. So for the time being, there will probably be no 64-bit experiments, but I'm sure my system is good enough to let me finally try tons of things out. In particular, I'd love to get my hands on BrandZ and run some Linux apps. And I will probably spend some time trying to reach some comfort level with my iPod 5G experiences under Solaris.

That's all for today, I'll be back soon enough!

The latest Solaris Express - SX 2/06 - is out. You can download it here.

As always, no one will describe all the new features of this build better than Dan Price, so I advise you take few minutes of your time to read a rather long cSX 2/06 hanges list on his blog:
What's New In Solaris Express 2/06

I'm mostly interested in the following things:
- improved ZFS performance and lots of ZFS bugs fixed
- resource pools are now managed under SMF, and represented by two services: svc:/system/pools and svc:/system/pools/dynamic.
- the Greyhound project integrated - it's an in-kernel SSL proxy

Thanks to Adam Leventhal, who is one of DTrace authors, I've learned about the recent article on DTrace by Bryan Cantrill.

I liked this article a lot, so it's been immediately added to my Useful DTrace resources index.

You can read the article by following this link: Hidden in Plain Sight

As it was recently announced on the OpenSolaris website, the official OpenSolaris downloads page has got improved. Now this page looks more like a roadmap of resources which could be of interest for a potential OpenSolaris user: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/

The really positive change though is that you no longer have to be registered with Sun Download Center to download OpenSolaris anymore. Now everything is openly accessible at a very useful OpenSolaris Download Center page with direct download links, this seriously simplifies the download process.

From now on, the latest OpenSolaris build will be available for download at this URL:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/current/