Can I install OpenCSW on Illumos-based operating systems (OpenIndiana, Smartos, OmniOS...) ?

There are several existing distributions that are based on Illumos, the open-source kernel derived from the now dead Opensolaris, like SmartOS and Illumos.

These distributions are still close to Solaris 11 in many areas.

Can we install the OpenCSW packages on these systems ?

asked: 2013-11-03 by: yann


yann answers:

As Opencsw doesn't provide yet an IPS package repository, you need to have at least the svr4 package tools available on the illumos derivative operating system (pkgadd, pkgrm, pkgtrans...).

That being said, OpenCSW packages are mainly tested on Solaris 10 and 11 systems, so you could run into some unknown issues, in particular some packages might rely on versions of libraries not available on Illumos derivates or might be too tied to some operating system private interfaces (like lsof).

In details, the situation by distro is the following:

OmniOS and OpenIndiana

These two operating systems still ship the native svr4 package tools, so you can easily bootstrap the opencsw using the standard Opencsw installation manual.

SmartOS

This popular derivative of Illumos doesn't ship the svr4 package tools at all, except pkgtrans which allows to extract the content of svr4 packages. It doesn't ship either the IPS tools.

So if you really want to install opencsw packages on SmartOS, you can:

To install svr4pkg, just download it at the appropriate location:

    mkdir -p /opt/csw/bin
    curl -L -o /opt/csw/bin/svr4pkg http://goo.gl/OhuXlW
    chmod +x /opt/csw/bin/svr4pkg

Then use it to install itself as a package:

    /opt/csw/bin/svr4pkg add -n -d http://goo.gl/iITp4i

That's all ! You can now follow the standard Opencsw installation manual from the first step:

    /opt/csw/bin/pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now

...