Setting up Sun Solaris

Setting up a new Sun Solaris 10 box for a large telecom client was quite an adventure!  First, I had to figure out where to get all my packages from.  Choices were:

• Sun Freeware (sunfreeware.com is not even accessible at time of this writing)
• OpenCSW.org
• BlastWave.org

After much trial and and lots of error, I got help from Maciej Blizinski on the IRC channel #opencsw.  He and others on the channel easily convinced me that OpenCSW covers many more packages and is more up-to-date and easier to use than BlastWave.  In fact, on Blastwave, it is harder to get an accurate picture of how many packages are available and how recent they are.

The biggest problem was converting from one to the other since they both use the same namespace (/opt/csw) and package-name prefixes (CSW-).  Fortunately, Maciej published an informative post where he showed how to save the list of installed packages, uninstall everything, then re-install it all from opencsw.org.