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Questions about the Solaris packages

  1. I try to run the programs from their icons, but nothing happens.
  2. I get error messages from ld.so.1 when I try to run some of the programs.
  3. I don't have root access on my machine. How can I install your packages?
  4. How come your packages are so small?
  5. Why don't you put the dtappintegrate, dtaction etc. commands into a postinstall script?

I try to run the programs from their icons, but nothing happens.

The two most likely reasons are: In both cases, try running the programs from the command line. The names are generally the same as the icon label, but in all lowercase (e.g., "nedit", "xmms", "lbreakout", "prboom", etc.). That should give you a more or less informative error message.

I get error messages from ld.so.1 when I try to run some of the programs.

If you get messages like this: 
  ld.so.1: /opt/sfw/bin/program: fatal: libgtk-1.2.so.0: open failed: No such file or directory
  Killed
it almost certainly means that you haven't installed GTK+, which is required by a lot of the programs on my site. Similarly, many of the games and multimedia programs require SDL, or some of the image or audio libraries (jpeg, tiff, png, audiofile, esd). All these packages, except SDL, can be found on the Solaris 8 Software Companion CD. (Yes, SDL is there too, but only an old and incomplete version.)

If you do not have, and do not want, the Software Companion, you can get the needed packages from SunFreeware instead. Many of the packages on this site will look for shared libraries in /opt/sfw/lib first, then in /usr/local/lib.

To find all the dependencies of a given program, use ldd, like this: 

  % ldd /opt/sfw/bin/xmms

I don't have root access on my machine. How can I install your packages?

There are two problems here. First, only root can run "pkgadd". If you have sysadmin privileges on your machine, that is, if you are a member of the "sysadmin" group, you may still add packages with admintool. Otherwise, you can convert the package from datastream to file system format: 
  % pkgtrans file.pkg .
This will create a directory with the name of the package ("xmms", "nedit", or whatever); within that directory, there will be another directory called "reloc", which contains all the actual files (but not the symlinks) in the package. Just move the files to ~/bin or wherever.

The second problem is that all my archives are built to look for support files in the /opt/sfw hierarchy. For instance, XMMS will look for its plugins in /opt/sfw/lib/xmms, and prboom looks for WAD files in /opt/sfw/games/doom. In some cases this may be changed with program specific environment variables, but not always. So the "real" answer to this question is: Ask your system administrator to install the files.

How come your packages are so small? What's missing?

The packages on my site are primarily intended for users, not developers. Specifically, that means: However, my packages do include header and config files, so if you just want to compile something that uses SDL, my SDL package should work.

Some packages are also built without locale files (translations).

Why don't you put the dtappintegrate, dtaction etc. commands into a postinstall script?

I have deliberately chosen not to do this, for several reasons:
  1. Many people (myself included) don't like to run scripts they can't see, written a total stranger, with super-user privileges.
  2. Some people don't use CDE, and thus don't care about CDE integration.
  3. If you install multiple packages, you only need to run dtappintegrate and dtaction once, after all packages are installed. Running it for each installed program is just a waste of time.
  4. The "dtaction ReloadApps" command must be run by the current user, not by root -- which is difficult or impossible to do from a pkgadd package.
espen@espen.s5.com