Installing and Maintaining Solaris 8
- The Solaris 8 Distribution
- Installing Solaris 8
- Software Package Administration
- Patch Administration
- Practice Questions
- Need to Know More?
Terms you'll need to understand:
Software clusters
Software groups
Packages
Patches
Techniques you'll need to master:
Installing Solaris 8
Adding and removing packages
Listing installed packages
Adding and removing patches
Listing installed patches
The first section of this chapter covers the Solaris 8 distribution. Next, installing the operating system is covered in detail. The last two sections summarize the commands for performing software package administration and patch administration. The Installation test objectives are covered in this chapter.
The Solaris 8 Distribution
Solaris 8 system and application software is delivered as collections of files and directories, referred to as packages. You can copy these packages onto the system from CD-ROM or magnetic tape as a single compressed file and uncompress them for installation.
Included with the package is information about the package, such as its title, storage requirements, and version. Also included are any custom scripts needed to properly install the software.
Sometimes system software is distributed in more than one package, but you need to distribute and install the packages as a unit. A collection of two or more related packages is referred to as a software cluster, a logical grouping of packages.
The Solaris 8 operating system is preconfigured into software groups consisting of different collections of software clusters and packages. The five software groups are shown in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Solaris 8 Software Groups
Software Group |
Contents |
Core |
Required operating system files |
End-User System Support |
Core plus windowing environments |
Developer System Support |
End-User plus development environment |
Entire Distribution |
Developer System plus enhanced features |
Entire Distribution Plus OEM |
Entire Distribution plus third-party hardware drivers |
NOTE
Some Solaris 8 documents refer to the operating system's preconfigured software groups as software configuration clusters or simply clusters. The term software cluster also refers to a collection of packages, so this reference can create confusion. This book uses the term software groups because it is the term used in the Solaris 8 Advanced Installation Guide.
The Entire Distribution Plus OEM group is available only for SPARC platforms.