Packaging: OpenSolaris, Solaris 11 & Illumos

Packaging: OpenSolaris, Solaris 11 & Illumos

Packaging under UNIX Systems had traditionally been the SRV4 type of packaging. Under newer Operating Systems, network enabling the packaging had been accomplished, through proprietary extensions. Open Source Communities, like OpenCSW, had created network enablement for SVR4 packages. Illumos had done a similar move, from the OpenSolaris base. This tool is called "pkg".

What is "pkg"

The "pkg" tool is called the Image Packaging Systems. Today, packaging under the direction of Oracle had moved to Python language based packaging, instead of native C based binaries, placing greater levels of external language dependencies on the base OS. SVR4 packaging uses multiple binaries (i.e. pkgadd, pkgrm, pkgproto, etc.), while "pkg" bundles many aspects of packaging into a single executable.

Cheat Sheet & Exercises

A short Image Packaging System cheat-sheet is available from Oracle on the , using "wireshark" as an example. The cheat-sheet can be used for developing other exercises to download & manage other tools like: fping & top