Thursday June 05, 2008

[Thanks to Michal Bielicki for pointing out an error in the original post. The correct name of the Sun Studio package is "ss-dev". I have fixed the text and graphics below to reflect this.]

If you want to install either the Sun compilers and developer tools or the GNU developer tools onto OpenSolaris 2008.05, I summarize the process below. Currently, the procedure is somewhat less than obvious, hence this blog entry.

First, start the package manager: System -> Administration -> Package Manager. You will see the following:

Looking for the compilers, you might select Developer Tools. However, doing so will show the following:

Unfortunately, the compiler packages were not categorized correctly and therefore they do not show up under this package category. We will fix this, but the good news is that the packages are available, if you know where to look.

With the 'All' category selected, enter 'gcc' into the search field. You do not need to press return. The interface is slow, but it will eventually update to show the following:

To install the GNU tools, select the gcc-dev package and click on Install/Update in the toolbar. Once the download (about 120MB) and the installation complete, you can open a new terminal window and type 'gcc' to verify the software has been installed correctly. The installation script has created links from /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/sfw/bin/gcc as a convenience.

To find the Sun compilers and tools, type "ss-dev" ("ss" stands for Sun Studio, which is what we call our compiler and tools suite) and you will see the following:

Select the "ss-dev" package and then click on Install/Update on the toolbar. Once the download (over 600MB) and the installation complete, you can open a terminal window and try the 'cc' command. Don't panic when it fails. As you can see below, the compilers have been installed in /opt. You will need to either modify your startup files to include this directory on your execution path, or create the appropriate links from /usr/bin into this directory. I've been told we will fix this inconvenience soon. A wonderful benefit of network-based package management is that we can fix this relatively quickly and then subsequent downloaders of the package will see the new behavior automatically.