Tuesday, December 9, 2008

OpenSolaris: life without Gnome

I have console OpenSolaris installed (see my post of December 08). But I have forgotten to install the most valuable package:
pkg install SUNWzfs-auto-snapshot

Now I can install X:
pkg install SUNWxorg-server
pkg install SUNWxorg-xsvc
pkg install SUNWxorg-agp
pkg install SUNWxorg-graphics-ddx
pkg install SUNWxorg-client-programs
pkg install SUNWxwfsw
pkg install SUNWxwopt
pkg install FSWxorg-fonts

After installation I run "xinit" and get xterm. However it would be better to install some minimalistic window manager, for example, dwm.
pkg install SUNWwget
wget http://code.suckless.org/dl/dwm/dwm-5.3.1.tar.gz

Gcc,binutils,gmake and headers are required:
pkg install SUNWxorg-headers
pkg install SUNWgmake
pkg install SUNWbinutils
pkg install SUNWgcc

I love vim. Also I need gzip:
pkg install SUNWvim
pkg install SUNWgzip


If you plan to compile some other apps, I advice to install substudio:
pkg install sunstudioexpress

Next I unpack archive, correct config.h and compile dwm. It's possible to start dwm xsession from smf. You can look how it's made in BeleniX or MilaX.


As a result I got system with short boot time and an easy and fast window manager.
At the end I need usual user:
mkdir /home
useradd -d /home/me -m -s /bin/ksh -c "System Developer" me
passwd me

5 comments:

Unknown said...

As always, so nice and useful work from you!
Will you employ this tecnique to build your next milax distro?
Would a distro built/installed like this be updatable with an image update or would then gnome be installed also?
Tnx in advance and keep up the good work!

alhazred said...

If packages which you put have no dependences on a gnome I think you can use image update

Anonymous said...

Alex, thanks a lot for the inspiration! I love WMII window manager, so I'll try to run it on OpenSolaris.

Unknown said...

nice post!
can you please explain how to configure dwm (Xinitrc) and how to start it?

tony said...

This a nice post. Do you have any info on doing this on Solaris 10? It should be close to what you have already provided.

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