Freeware Downloads for the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

Welcome to Sun's freeware download site for the Solaris 8 Operating Environment for SPARC and Intel Architecture platforms. Sun is wor king to make the Solaris platform and GNU/Linux operating system seamlessly interoperate so that users can maintain productivity in mixed environments.

The software on this site is for downloading the individual Companion Software packages (freeware) for Solaris 8 update 2/02. Included are hundreds of freeware commands, applications, libraries, and developer tools built and packaged for the Solaris 8 Operating Environme nt. The freeware is available in pre-compiled binary and source code format.

Note: The Solaris Companion CD freeware packages correspond to the specific Solaris 8 OE update release. Freeware for earlier r eleases of the Solaris OE, as well as a number of additional packages, are available at http://sunfreewa re.com, an independent Web site maintained by Steve Christensen.

Note: The Solaris 8 Operating Environment can be downloaded for free from the Free Solaris Binary License Program web page.

Users must have root access to install these packages and should be familiar with the following Solaris 8 Operating Environment comman d-line utilities:

/usr/bin/unzip
/usr/sbin/pkgadd

Note: For detailed instructions on using pkgadd see the Software Administration of the Solaris 8 System Administration Guide, Volume 1.

Many freeware packages have dependencies on other technologies that require users to install an additional package prior to installing the desired package.

If you plan to install several packages from this web site, we recommend that you first download and install the Dependency Bundle for your platform.

If you prefer to handle dependencies on a per-package basis, see the dependencies table as a reference.

There are three steps to installing a package:

Following is a sample session of a user installing the LessTif package. In this example, the `$' character is the command-line prompt before switching to root and the `#' character is the prompt after switching to root.

$ /bin/su -   
# unzip LessTif-0.92.26-pkg.zip   <Return>
Archive:  LessTif-0.92.26-pkg.zip
inflating: SFWlestf
# pkgadd -d ./SFWlestf  <Return>

The following packages are available:

1  SFWlestf   LessTif - GNU LessTif Library (SPARC)
Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process all packages).
(default: all) [?,??,q]: 1   <return>

Note: Although it's common for zip archives to contain multiple files, most of the zip files on this site do not. In other word s, each zip file "inflates" into a single pkgadd file. The only exceptions are the two dependency bundles.

We recommend that you first download and install the dependency bundle for your platform.

1. Download and unzip the file that corresponds to your platform. It will inflate into multiple pkgadd packages.
2. Install the following packages in the order shown below:
   1. SFWgcmn
   2. SFWglib
   3. SFWxpm
   4. SFWpng
   5. SFWjpg
   6. SFWtiff
   7. SFWungif
   8. SFWtcl
   9. SFWtk
3. Install the remaining packages in any order.

Packages Not Covered by the Dependency Bundle

Five large packages: Qt, KDE, Lestif, Emacs, and Python are not included in the dependency bundle because of their size. The fo llowing list shows which software depends on each of these packages:

For example, before installing XEmacs, you must first download and install the dependency bundle and LesTif.

Once you've installed the dependency bundle (and if necessary, Qt, KDE, Lestif, Emacs, and Python), all other packages can be installe d independently and in any order.

Click here for md5sum checksums for all the packages.

The md5sum utility is typically distributed as a component of "textutils", a free software package from the GNU Project. On a Solaris 8 platform with the Solaris Companion CD installed, the md5sum executable is in the /opt/sfw/bin directory and is called gmd5sum.