Open Community Software (OpenCSW) for Solaris
Posted on January 12th, 2010 by Sebastian Kayser
Who has ever set foot on the Sun Solaris OS (with previous GNU/Linux experience) will have noticed that the Solaris userland is missing many of those precious tools that one is used to. Or even worse, tools that are required to get a job done.
This is where the Open Community Software (OpenCSW) project at opencsw.org comes into play. It’s an open source effort to port, package, and distribute those missing tools to the Solaris OS (currently focussing on Solaris 8 – 10). Its repository currently holds just over 2000 packages and – to only name a few – includes applications
- for sysadmins (Nagios, Cfengine, Puppet, Syslog-ng)
- for developers (Subversion, Git, Mercurial)
- as well as for end users (Pidgin, TightVNC, Synergy)
With pkgutil as the package installation tool of choice, installation of OpenCSW packages is a matter of configuring a mirror and telling pkgutil which package to install, all the dependencies will be automatically fetched and installed along the way.
As an open source project, OpenCSW not only makes its packages available to everyone, but also provides porting feedback to the original software authors. Its build system and build recipes are public so that others can easily get started in packaging on the Solaris OS and it offers some easily accessible support channels for users (mailing lists, IRC, bug tracker) so that they can get help when they encounter problems with their installations. In short, OpenCSW strives “to be a good citizen of the open source eco system”. And it has been doing so since 2002.
ConSol* didn’t start this project, but a couple of folks here at ConSol* regularly contribute to it. They do so to satisfy their own selfish needs (they maintain Solaris-based datacenter environments for a living), but also to steadily learn and enjoy assisting people in getting their environments and setups running on Solaris.
Similar projects are: Sunfreeware and Blastwave. In fact, OpenCSW is a fork of Blastwave (did we already tell you that we chose OpenCSW for our own infrastructure?). Admittedly, the opencsw.org website is in dire need of a makeover. Luckily, Web 2.0 skills are not yet required to produce good software packages.
Need any Solaris packages or want to get started packaging yourself? Let us know.