Solaris 8 for Sparc, base install recovery

In November I installed Solaris 8 on a few old Ultra 10s. I decided on the Core install only. This gives you little in the way of basic applications. With the help of SunFreeware and my Solaris 8 Software CDs, I managed to recover to a much more functional state.

First, I had a hell of a time getting any packages onto the Sun. Apparently whatever variant of ftp that shipped with Solaris 8 sucks. Anything I tried to download locally or from SFW FTP mirrors was hopelessly corrupt. I finally ended up setting up an NFS share on my Debian GNU/Linux workstation and offering up packages from SFW that way.

For GCC 3.x on Solaris 8, you need these additional packages:

system      SUNWbtool      CCS tools bundled with SunOS
system      SUNWbtoox      CCS libraries bundled with SunOS (64-bit)
system      SUNWsprot      Solaris Bundled tools
system      SUNWtoo        Programming Tools
system      SUNWarc        Archive Libraries
system      SUNWlibm       Sun WorkShop Bundled libm

But I don’t think these:

system      SUNWman              On-Line Manual Pages
system      SUNWdpl              Developer Profiled Libraries
system      SUNWdplx             Developer Profiled Libraries (64-bit)
system      SUNWhea              SunOS Header Files
system      SUNWsutl             Static Utilities

I also installed these packages with 64-bit variants of libraries and executables:

system      SUNWarcx       Archive Libraries (64-bit)
system      SUNWcarx       Core Architecture, (Root) (64-bit)
system      SUNWcslx       Core Solaris Libraries (64-bit)
system      SUNWcstlx      Apptrace Utility (64-bit)
system      SUNWcsxu       Core Solaris (Usr) (64-bit)
system      SUNWesxu       Extended System Utilities (64-bit)
system      SUNWlclx       Locale Conversion Library (64-bit)
system      SUNWlmsx       Forte Developer Bundled 64-bit shared libm
system      SUNWlocx       System Localization (64-bit)
system      SUNWtoox       Programming Tools (64-bit)

For apps that demand libX11:

SUNWxwplt	    X Window System platform software

From SFW, I needed those dependency packages for building stuff (PostgreSQL or bash wanted readline, I think).

application SMCflex        flex
application SMCbison       bison
application SMCreadl       readline

After that, you need to kick the Solaris 8 linker so it knows where all the SFW libraries are installed. I used crle to accomplish this. You could also use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but there are quite a few reasons why this is unwise:

You can get at the man pages by setting your MANPATH. You get this by default under Linux, so I never had to mess with it before.

export MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/local/man

Of course you’ll want to install OpenSSH.

But you don’t get a /dev/random style device on Solaris 8. Fortunately, there is a patch to fix that.

Fetch 112438-02 from Sun Solve. You also need these packages installed:

  • SUNWadmc
  • SUNWadmfw
  • SUNWlibC

You can apply this box to a live Sun machine without rebooting by using this script. Thanks to Andrew Caines for that!

Solaris; It’s good for you.

This entry was written by jasonb, posted on 2/27/2004 at 4:05 pm, filed under Quick Guides. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.