Wednesday, July 05, 2006

S10U2 companion problems

Recently, the update 2 of Solaris 10 was released.

Along with this comes the companion CD - a collection of unsupported freeware.

However, the S10U2 companion DVD has a number of problems. Apart from the old one of being distributed as a single ISO image with both sparc and x86 binaries, so that you have to download both architectures even if you only wanta one, some new problems have appeared.
  • There isn't an installer. THere are over a hundred packages here and installing them individually by hand can get a bit tedious.
  • Worse, some packages depend on packages that are no longer shipped. I had to install SFWgcc2l, SFWgcc34l, SFWgfile, SFWgtext, SFWshutl, and probably SFWgm4 off the S10U1 companion to get the dependencies and missing components back.
  • Some useful utilities (some of them listed above, but also things like bluefish) have just disappeared.
  • Coreutils has been added, without the g prefixes.

For all that pain, is there any gain? I can't see any. I can't see any new packages that add any value, we've lost functionality, the installed packages don't work, and it's not even as if we have anything useful like a more up to date version of KDE.

I recommend going back to the S10U1 companion.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Normally companion CD consists "installer" script in the root directory.

Peter Tribble said...

Normally, there was. Not any more...

Anonymous said...

oh, go to blastwave and drop useless "companion cd"

Anonymous said...

Give Nexenta (gnusolaris.org) a try. It is at alpha 5 but real slick and the debian apt-get simply rocks.