I am so confused on where to begin when it comes to dealing with package management with Solaris 10. I am so used to YUM(fedora)URPMI(Mandriva) and Yast(Suse) - RPM packages. What does Solaris use for package management and what are the files called? How would I query my system to see the packages installed and the names and the files associated with the packages like with linux: rpm -ql package-name ? Also where does Sun on its website hold the repositories for Solaris 10 in case of add-on that I would need. I am trying to install net::telnet for Solaris 10 and I would like to find a package for it as oppossed to installing it from a .tar

Solaris is a well documented system and you can surf docs.sun.com to find everything you need.

In you specific case, in the Solaris 10 System administrator collection, you can read the "Basic administration" book, whose chapter 16 and following tells you all the answers you need.

The short story: pkgadd adds a package, pkginfo lists information about installed packages.

I think you may find a lot of people use the
pkg-get system from blastwave.org.

it enables you to download, search and install in one go.

http://www.blastwave.org/howto.html

there is a GUI package browser too, whic for the life of me I cannot remember.
it's in the CD applications dir though.

I downloaded a file called Bolt.pkg

so to install it from the /tmp directory I would use:

When I do that I get:

I even copied the file to /var/lspool/pkg and I get the same thing. I am not liking Solaris.

pkgadd -d Bolt.pkg

download pkg-get from blastwave, make life simpler.

you will, remember when you started linux?
it was hard.

it's worth it just for ZFS.

I think it should be
so if you are in the package directory you can

that worked but you Solaris still has a long way to go as far as being user friendly and that is not to say much for linux. Many thank

true true,
but it is really for power users.

once you get into it you can appreciate the underlying quality of it.
Taken as an operating system, not an environment, it's a superb tool.

Solaris installation and packaging user-friendliness (or lack of) is being addressed by the Indiana project.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/

Personally, I think pkg-get/blastwave make it worse. The built-in package management is quite easy. When I start using blastwave, I start getting weird errors and seemingly unrelated packages start breaking. I definitly wouldn't recommend it to someone new.

It's off topic but I ask you because you keep on telling us about the wonderful linux world.

Insisting to compare with GNU/linux it's a bit absurd. As jlliagre explained, a project has been opened to resolve such issues (and more). Solaris had a specific target and now it's moving towards less "power users", too, and it's doing this much later than GNU/linux did. So, wait some time and try Indiana, too.

Nevertheless I would ask you: what would linux users' answer to your question? I see some distros in your profile but I'm sure that if we'd ask, for example, a Slackware user, a Debian user, a Gentoo user, etc., everyone would swear that its distro's pkg management is the best. At least, Solaris isn't as fragmented as GNU/linux distros' users are.

well, I am perfectly happy with pkg-get and have had no problems to date.

I use ubuntu on a laptop and I like the synaptic system, but I can't see it as 'better' than pkg-get;
it does the same thing, just with a GUI

I didn't even bother with slackware packages, pointless. I would compile myself.

I believe Dox System - Brian is ranting about Blastwave, not pkg-get. They shouldn't be confused.

pkg-get is a tool that automatize package installation and do it pretty well.

Blastwave is a community driven Solaris freeware repository which provides packages for Solaris 8 which generally run on newer Solaris releases. To avoid bad interactions with bundled software and because duplication is unavoidable, Blastwave is installing its files almost exclusively under /opt/csw directory. At least this prevents from breaking "official" packages. I agree some of the Blastwave packages are outdated or of uneven quality. Should one dislike Blastwave, pkg-get can still be used and point to any other repository supporting pkg-get catalog format, although I'm afraid only Sunfreeware is currently in the list.

can pkgadd install *.gz files? I noticed that on freesunware.com most of the packages are *.gz.

pkg-get is handling gzipped packages.

You need to uncompress the packages for pkgadd to install them.