The Sun Companion CD Project

The Sun Companion CD Project - In Great Detail

Sun and sunfreeware.com are cooperating to offer all of the Sun Companion CD freeware files (for Solaris 8, 9, 10, Nevada on SPARC and x86 and for Indiana on x86) on the sunfreeware.com ftp server.

The files on the Companion CD are in a different form than the ones from sunfreeware.com. The files in the Companion CD archives are compressed with the zip or bzip 2 programs rather than gzip and are uncompressed with the unzip or bunzip2 programs rather than gunzip.

The Companion CD files install in subdirectories of the /opt/sfw file system rather than in /usr/local.

On this page, I will describe in detail all of the ways to get the Companion CD files both from the main Sun servers and from sunfreeware.com. As the person responsible for the building of the Companion packages for Solaris 10 and above, I can provide considerable detail and support for these packages.

You might want to read this whole page before proceeding with any of the installation methods provided.

The Companion Project at Sun.com

If you wish to use only the instructions and files regarding the Companion CD from the main sun.com server, you can go to the

Solaris Operating System - Freeware

page where you can download DVD iso images for the full CD/DVD's or individual packages. This includes Solaris 8, 9, and 10 versions. Considerable detail on dependencies and installation are given on the above pages and the links therein. Typically, if you want to do downloads from the sun.com site, you will need a login you obtain by registering.

The Companion Project at OpenSolaris.org

The Companion project is now live with a Subversion repository as well as a buildable source tarball and binary and source packages created from that repository. If you want to study how the Companion packages are produced in the OpenSolaris environment, go to

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/companion/

Packages for Nevada releases are also placed there for download. There is a discussion group where comments about the package builds, updates, and other issues are considered by those of us who contribute to the Companion project.

The Companion Project at Sunfreeware.com

All of the Companion packages have been collected here in one easy-to-use location. A table has been created to give you an idea of what is currently available in each level of Solaris.

The Sun Companion CD Program Lists

ISO Images of all of the Companion Packages

Compressed .iso images of the Companion package collections for each level of Solaris are at

Companion ISO Images

These are

companion-i386-snv.iso.bz2    companion-sparc-sol10.iso.bz2
companion-i386-sol10.iso.bz2  companion-sparc-sol8.iso.bz2
companion-i386-sol8.iso.bz2   companion-sparc-sol9.iso.bz2
companion-i386-sol9.iso.bz2   companion-sparc-snv.iso.bz2

The naming convention is obvious (snv stands for Nevada). The files are compressed with bzip2, which should be available on all of the above systems either already in Solaris or from a sunfreeware.com package if needed. These files range in size from 188 to 443 megabytes. The packages for Solaris 10 were built for release U4.

There are two ways to use one of these collections.

Download one of the files - say companion-sparc-sol10.iso.bz2 to a directory, for example, /tmp.
cd to /tmp and run bunzip2 companion-sparc-sol10.iso.bz2

Mount the iso file with commands like (as root)

lofiadm -a /tmp/companion-sparc-sol10.iso /dev/lofi/1

mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

Now cd to /mnt and you will find the packages, for example, SFWyasr.pkg.bz2. Copy the packages you want to some directory, here just /tmp.
In /tmp, run bunzip2 SFWyasr.pkg.bz2.
Then run pkgadd -d SFWyasr.pkg and follow the instructions. The files will be installed in /opt/sfw subdirectories.

For Solaris 8 and 9, the packages are named slightly differently, but the procedure is similar except that you use the unzip command to uncompress the packages.

If you want to create a DVD from the .iso files, you can use the cdrw command available in some levels of Solaris, a PC or Mac burning program, or something like cdrtools - whatever you prefer. If you have cdrw, it is a simple matter to run

 
> cdrw -l

Looking for CD devices...
    Node	           Connected Device	           Device type
----------------------+--------------------------------+-----------------
 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2   | MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-845S  D200 | CD Reader/Writer

> cdrw -d c2t0d0s2 -i companion-sparc-sol10.iso

where the cdrw -l tells us what dvd device we might have. Assuming it is a DVD writer, then we use its device name in the second command to burn the DVD (after you have a blank DVD in the drive of course). The process usually takes a few minutes.

Downloading the Individual Companion Packages

Rather than download the entire set of packages, you can get them one at a time in the directories

i386 Solaris 8 Packages
i386 Solaris 9 Packages
i386 Solaris 10 Packages
i386 Nevada Packages

SPARC Solaris 8 Packages
SPARC Solaris 9 Packages
SPARC Solaris 10 Packages
SPARC Solaris Nevada Packages

The links

i386 Solaris Nevada pkginfo list
i386 Solaris Nevada pkginfo list

SPARC Solaris Nevada pkginfo list
SPARC Solaris Nevada pkginfolist

will give you the details for each Solaris 10 or Nevada package. The uncompress and pkgadd steps above are the same.

The Companion Project Using the Image Packaging System (IPS)

The Indiana version of OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris Project: Indiana

has a new developing packaging system

OpenSolaris Project: Image Packaging System

The Nevada versions of the (x86 only for now) Companion packages are available on a separate ips/pkg repository at

http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000

The Image Packaging System link above contains documentation on how to extract packages from and IPS repository. Note that when you install a package with the pkg install command for this repository, it will find those packages that are dependencies for a package and install those also.