Freeware Downloads for the Solaris 9 Operating System

Welcome to Sun's freeware download site for the Solaris Operating System for SPARC and x86 architecture platforms. Sun is working to make the Solaris platform and GNU/Linux operating system seamlessly interoperate so that users can maintain productivity in mixed environments.

This site enables users to download the Solaris Software Companion CD packages (freeware) individually. Included are hundreds of Linux and other Open Source applications, tools, and commands built for the Solaris 9 Operating System. The software is available in pre-compiled binary and source code format. For a listing of packages -- including information on the most recent package updates -- see the main Solaris Freeware page.

Note: The Solaris Companion CD freeware packages correspond to the specific Solaris OS release. Freeware for earlier releases of the Solaris OS, as well as a number of additional packages, are available at http://sunfreeware.com, an independent Web site maintained by Steve Christensen.

• Prerequisites for Installation
• Handling Dependencies
• Installing a Package
• Installing the Dependency Bundle
• Packages Not Covered by the Dependency Bundle
• md5sum Information
• Select a Download

Users must have root access to install these packages and should be familiar with the following Solaris Operating System command-line utilities:

/usr/bin/bunzip2
/usr/sbin/pkgadd

Note: For detailed instructions on using pkgadd see Basic Administration/Managing Software in the Solaris 9 System Administration Guide.

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.

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

In addition, some of the desktop packages such as xpdf depend on libraries that are part of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop.

There are three steps to installing a package:

• Elevate to root (su)
• Uncompress the package using the bunzip2 utility
• Pkgadd the package

Following is a sample session of a user installing the Bluefish 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
# bunzip2 SFWblue.bz2
# pkgadd -d . SFWblue

The following packages are available:

1  SFWblue     bluefish - HTML editor (sparc) 0.12,REV=2004.02.06.11.15
Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]: 

Freeware Printing Bundle

For your convenience, we've also created a "CUPS printing suite bundle". To install it, first download and uncompress/untar the file called Printing-<platform>-pkgs.tar.bz2 (where platform is either sparc or intel). Then install the packages in the following order: SFWaalib, SFWmpeg, SFWgimp, SFWgprnt, SFWespgs, SFWfltk, SFWoslp, SFWcups, SFWhpijs, SFWxpp, SFWpnm2p, SFWcprnt, SFWffltr and SFWfppd.

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

1. Download the file that corresponds to your platform.
2. Uncompress the file and extract its contents using the bunzip2 and tar utilities.
3. Install SFWgcmn, SFWungif and SFWter
4. Install SFWimlib
5. Install the rest of the packages.

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

• KDE depends on Qt
• Koffice depends on KDE, and Qt
• fetchmail depends on Python
• Emacspeak, EmacspeakSS, and W3 depend on Emacs

For example, before installing KDE, you must first download and install the dependency bundle and Qt.

Once you've installed the dependency bundle (and if necessary, Qt, KDE, Emacs, and Python), all other packages can be installed 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 9 platform with the Solaris Companion CD installed, the md5sum executable is in the /opt/sfw/bin directory and is called gmd5sum.

• Solaris 9 Companion Software SPARC Platform Edition
• Solaris 9 Companion Software x86 Platform Edition
• Solaris 9 Companion Software Source