In the last tutorial we saw the installation steps and configuration of Solaris 10 operating system. In this edition, I will show how to do basic customizations in your Solaris 10 desktop and install applications.

After installing Solaris 10 in my system, the first thing that I did was changing the look and feel of the desktop. I simply created a new panel and added a couple of my favourite applications.  Then, changed the back ground picture and opacity level.  No big deal!

Customization

Here starts the actual customization process. First of all, let’s check the shell by issuing:

echo $SHELL

If you are logging into the system for the first time, then the system will simply use the shell defined in /etc/profile (which will be /bin/sh). You can change this when you create a new user or by editing your profile file in the home directory (see the previous tutorial).

We can see the environment variables by using the env command. Typically it should have the following basic entries:

$ env
HOME=/export/home/your_username
PATH=/usr/bin:
LOGNAME=your_username
HZ=100
TERM=dtterm
TZ=Asia/India
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAIL=/var/mail/your_username
PWD=/home/your_username
USER=your_username

You can add more variables to your profile file located in the home directory. Here are few of them:

• CDPATH (to specify the directories to be searched – if the query doesn’t carry the full path)
• HISTORY(you can set the number of commands linked to it. This will be helpful, if you want to repeat commands in your shell)

For CSH and TCSH use (in the respective RC files):

set history=your_value

For Bourne, Bourne Again, Korn and Z shells use:

HISTORY=your_value

• HOME (as the name suggests, you can specify the path to your home directory using this)
• MAIL (If you are using a mail client like Mutt, you can specify the path to your Inbox – typical under /var/mail/)
• LOGNAME (used to set the login name)
• LPDEST (for setting default printer)
• SHELL (Another important one which can be used to select your preferred shell)
• TERMINFO ( You can use this to add a new terminal to the list)
• LANG (if you want to use another language, say  German or French)
• PATH (I’m sure that most of you would have used this before. This is used to set directories for searching programs)
• TERM  (To define your current terminal)
• TZ (For setting time zones)

Extras

And here are few extras:

You can use noclobber variable to prevent overwriting of files when you use cp (copy command). This variable will interfere with your C, Korn,Bourne Again and TC shells. In order to enable this feature, open your profile RC file (in your home folder) and enter the following line:

set noclobber

Umask is another useful variable. Typically, people set it to value 000. This means that when you create a file, you will have read and write access (but no execute permission – MOD 666) and the directory will have list, write and execute rights (MOD 777).

directory: rwxrwxrwx

File:rw-rw-rw-

But I wish to use a safer one. So I will set the variable as ‘022’ – This is equivalent to 644.

Installing applications in Solaris

Since it is a UNIX based system, you can always install applications from source. But this is time consuming. So you need to use a tool called ‘pkgadd’ (make sure that you added the path properly -  ‘/var/spool/pkg’) for installing packages.

You may note that SunFreeware is a place where you can get the packages for  Sparc and Intel architectures. Here you can see that I’m going to install GCC (compiler) in my Solaris system:

Oops! wget not found. Now I have to install ‘wget’ in order to fetch packages using terminal. For that I need to go to the website and download the wget package manually and install it in the system.

I downloaded the wget package and issued:

gunzip /path_to_file/package

pkgadd –d /path_to_file/extracted_package

You may note that since it being a .gz package, I had to gunzip (same as gzip) it first. Then, the system asked me to confirm the process:

Done.

I have installed wget. Now I can use it for fetching the GCC package.

Another useful tool is pkg-get. Here also you need to install it from the repository:

pkgadd -d http://www.blastwave.org/pkg_get.pkg

Now you can issue:

pkg-get -i gcc

You can issue this command for installing other applications in future.