Thursday June 28, 2007

Solaris Companion DVD is my new best friend

Deciding that knowing how to use traditional UNIX tools is what separates the men from the boys in the software world, I last night embarked on a program of self-education on my experimental Solaris system. You never know when you might be stuck in Bazookastan with only a command line between you and certain death, so I want to be prepared. Bitmapped tools are for wimps.

First step: install Pine for reading email. I still haven't figured out how to compile open source programs from source, so I needed a compiled binary. Fortunately, I had hung on to the Solaris Companion DVD from one of my earlier Solaris forays. I popped it into the Dell's disk drive, and presto -- a world of nifty FOSS applications was at my fingertips. There was a cool little wizard that divided the apps into useful categories like publishing, networking, utilities and so forth. There is no index, which I found disconcerting, but if you select a category to install, then go to the next screen, it will tell you what is about to be installed. You can then backtrack and deselect the stuff you don't want by using the Custom Install choice.  I wound up selecting only Pine and Mutt.

Luckily, the install wizard tells you what directory the apps are going into, which is /opt/sfw/bin. I was worried that I was getting source and would have to compile, but they actually are binary executables. Excellent!

Then I made a classic newbie error. I cd'd to the install directory, and attempted to run both Pine and Mutt by typing in their names. Nothing happened. I resorted to the Java Desktop System file browser and clicked on them. Nothing happened. Rats! Was I supposed to run another install program before they would run, a la Windows? I was stumped.

I finally realized that I was still thinking like a Windows person. Once you step through the looking glass into the UNIX world, things are just... different. Counterintuitively, the fact that you are in the directory where an executable resides doesn't mean that you can run it. To run something, its directory has to be in your PATH. One of my Sun buddies, Raymond Tam, had explained this to me some time ago, but I had forgotten. When I finally remembered, I got out Steve Moritsugu's excellent Practical UNIX, and followed his instructions for adding /opt/sfw/bin to my PATH.

It worked! Well, sort of. I was able to bring up mutt, but pine seemed to be missing a library. I'll check the Companion DVD to see if I can find it there tonight.

Update: Actually, there is a way to add the current directory to your PATH, but it seems a little risky to me, so I didn't take that option. Of course, you can also run any UNIX application by specifying its full PATH when you invoke it.