OpenSolaris™ Bible

Chapter 6. Software Management

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Installing packages

• Searching packages

• Updating a system

• Managing boot environments

• Managing a software repository

• Building a distribution

Once you've installed an operating system, you'll most likely need to add software that wasn't installed initially. It's also likely that you'll soon want to upgrade your installed software to obtain new functionality or fixes for bugs that are causing problems or that present a security threat. Software management is one of the most common administrative tasks that you'll perform on your system, so it's critical to understand the tools available.

As mentioned in earlier chapters, one of the key features of OpenSolaris is a new software management system: the Image Packaging System (IPS). Chapter 3 presented a basic introduction to the pkg command; in this chapter, you'll learn more about IPS and software management on OpenSolaris.

Note

IPS can be used on operating systems other than OpenSolaris, but such usage is beyond the scope of this book. See the IPS project site at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg for information.

Package Management

Like other operating systems, software for OpenSolaris is distributed in the form of a package. Oversimplified a bit, a package is a bundle of files that is installed to provide a specific function, such as word processing. Once upon a time, software packages were large and standalone, which meant that installing a package was a simple operation of copying the files from ...