Solaris pkgadm tool

[from bolthole.com]

Current Release: v0.9 (initial public release)

This tool is a text-menu driven interface to adding and removing packages on solaris. It can be used to install packages either from a local directory/cdrom, or by automatically downloading from a sunfreeware.com mirror site.

Since adding and deleting packages requires root access, this program effectively requires root access for you to use.

This is an example of running pkgadm in an xterm window:
xterm screenshot

Features

A brief list of the more useful features:

Hands-free installation of ALL packages in a directory
Built-in selectable list of mirror sites
Dynamic changing of sites/directory to install from
Adjustable ask/don't ask behaviour
Downloads to /var/run rather than current directory
Menu-specific help

Email me your favourite feature!

As indicated by the 0.9 revision number, this is not a 100% feature-complete version, but it has enough functionality to be very useful at this point. The final version will be downloadable as a package itself.

Requirements

You should already have "wget" and "gzip" installed. Additionally, if you are not running solaris 8, you will have to do the following as root:

mkdir /var/run

Using pkgadm behind an ftp proxy

This program partly shares the pkg-get config file, /etc/pkg-get.conf. If you need to use a proxy to reach the outside, you will need to

Install 'wget' yourself
Adjust the pkg-get config file as indicated by the comments in the file.

To get wget installed, you can either install it from the solaris 8 "companion CD", or download the package from www.sunfreeware.com, or download the source and compile it yourself.

The pkg-get.conf file will be created after running pkgadm once.

Download and install

The following is an architecture-neutral program; it will run on sparc and x86. Download pkgadm-0.9.tar.gz, and gunzip it. tar xf pkgadm-0.9.tar.gz will create a pkgadm directory. There are a lot of things in that directory. Just run the pkgadm script from that directory: All the other stuff is internal-only.

Please let me know your impressions after using the program.

The final 1.0 version will install a script /usr/bin/pkgadm, and everything else will go in /usr/lib/pkgadm/

Difficulties

People have reported various difficulties using pkgadm with the required function keys, both in dtterm, and xterm. The solution to this seems to be to either log in 'directly' as root, or to use 'su root', NOT 'su - root'

If you would prefer a command-line utility, you can use pkg-get instead.

Author: Philip Brown
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