Sun and sunfreeware.com are cooperating to offer all of the Sun Companion CD (more recently DVD) freeware files (for Solaris 8, 9, 10 for SPARC and x86) on the sunfreeware.com servers.
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 bzip2 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.
Solaris Operating System - Freeware
page where you can download DVD iso images for the full DVD's. This includes Solaris 9 and 10 versions. Individual packages for Solaris 9 are available at the above link also. 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.
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.
Solaris 10 U6 (10/08) Companion Release
The most recent releases of the Companion DVD for Solaris 10 U6 (10/08) can be obtained at the following links.
Zipped iso image of SPARC, x86, and source files:
sol-10-u6-companion-ga-iso.bz2
See the discussion below for how to mount an iso image.
Individual packages and source files can be found at
It is also important that you look at the
LICENSE_NOTICE
Legal_Notice
README
files before using any of the individual packages.
To install the above individual packages, download one of the files, say SFWaalib.zip from the x86 directory (if you are using an x86 machine of course) to your /tmp directory say and do, as root,
cd /tmp unzip SFWaalib.zip pkgadd -d . SFWaalibYou will see copyright and other legal information, mention of any package dependencies, and the files that are installed in /opt/sfw.
The Solaris 8, 9, and 10U4 releases of the Companion packages
Compressed .iso images of the Companion package collections for earlier releases of Solaris (and for an earlier Nevada release) are at
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.
lofiadm -a /tmp/companion-sparc-sol10.iso /dev/lofi/1 mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
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 U4 Packages
i386 Nevada Packages
SPARC Solaris 8 Packages
SPARC Solaris 9 Packages
SPARC Solaris 10 U4 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 U4 or Nevada package. The uncompress and pkgadd steps above are the same though you may need either unzip or bunzip2 to do the uncompress steps.