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You're reading from Oracle Solaris 11: First Look

Product typeBook

Published inJan 2013

Reading LevelBeginner

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781849688307

Edition1st Edition

Languages

C++

Tools

Oracle Solaris

Concepts

Cloud Computing

Author (1)

Philip P. Brown

Package updates and patching

As mentioned in the first half of this chapter, patching as a separate process no longer exists. To patch, you must upgrade to a newer version of the software package in question.

At a simple level, to update all packages on your system, if newer versions are available on your configured repository, you can just run the following command:

pkg update

If you are unsure whether you need to run an update or would like to know which packages need an update first, you can use the following command:

pkg list -u

If you want to downgrade a package, or similarly, do not want to upgrade it to the latest version, you can also call the update subcommand with a specific version of a package if it is available, for example:

pkg update somepkg@1.2.3

That being said, Solaris packages are usually locked into a particular set of revisions via a meta package called entire. It is normally not possible to manually install a package from a newer release of Solaris 11: one must first explicitly upgrade to a newer entire package. To see the available versions, use the following command

pkgrepo list -s (repo_url) entire

If you have chosen to previously set up your own repository for Solaris, (as mentioned in the first part of this chapter, by downloading your own Solaris Repository Image from Oracle), you might add your own local repository. As pkg update and pkg install will by default install the latest version of a package, if it finds that multiple are available, there is not much risk involved in having this available as a fallback.

Here's an example of configuring your own repository to be the primary source for Solaris packages, with the Oracle site as a backup:

pkg set-publisher -g http://your.site solaris
pkg set-publisher -m http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release solaris

Gaining access to the latest versions of Solaris packages (that is, patch updates) requires a support contract to get access to a private repository. Full details for this can be found at:

https://pkg-register.oracle.com/

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Published in: Jan 2013Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781849688307

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Author (1)

Philip P. Brown

Philip P. Brown was introduced to computers at the early age of 10, by a Science teacher at St. Edmund's College, Ware, UK. He was awestruck by the phenomenal power of the ZX81's 3 MHz, Z80 CPU, and 1 K of RAM, showcasing the glory of 64 x 48 monochrome block graphics! The impressionable lad promptly went out and spent his life savings to acquire one of his very own, and then spent many hours keying in small BASIC programs such as "Ark Royal", a game where you land a block pretending to be an aircraft, on a bunch of lower blocks pretending to be an aircraft carrier. Heady stuff! When birthday money allowed expanding the ZX81 to an unbelievable 16 K of RAM, he also felt the need to acquire a patch cable to allow him to actually save programs to audio cassettes. Once this was deployed to the family cassette recorder, he was not seen or heard from for many months that followed. Phil's first exposure to Sun Microsystems was at U.C. Berkeley in 1989, as part of standard computer science classwork. Students were expected to do their classwork on diskless Sun 3/50 workstations running SunOS 4.1.1. During this time, he wrote his first serious freeware program, "kdrill", which at one time was part of the official X11 distribution, and remains in some Linux distros to this day. He eventually acquired a Sun workstation for personal use (with a disk and quarter-inch tape drive) and continued his home explorations, eventually transitioning from SunOS to Solaris, around Solaris 2.5.1. The principles of the original, pre-GPL freeware licenses prevalent in 1989 inspired Phil the most. Led by their example, he has contributed to an assortment of free software projects along the way. A little-known fact is that he is responsible for "MesaGL" morphing into the modern GLX/OpenGL implementation it is known for today. At the time, MesaGL was primarily an OpenGL workalike with a separate, non-X11 API, as author Brian Paul did not believe that it could function in a speed-effective way. In 2003, Phil wrote the first GLX integration proof-of-concept code, which convinced Brian to eventually commit to true GLX extension support. In 2002, Phil created pkg-get, inspired by Debian's apt-get utility, and started off CSW packaging. This, at last, brought the era of network-installed packages to Solaris. All major public Solaris package repositories prior to Solaris 11 still use pkg-get format catalogs for their software. In reality, Phil also had an impact on the existence of Solaris itself. In 2002, Sun Microsystems was on the road to canceling Solaris x86 as a product line. The community was outraged, and a vote in the old "solarisonintel" Yahoo! group resulted in six community representatives making the case for x86 to Sun. Phil was one of those six who eventually flew to Sun HQ to meet the head honchos and banish the forces of evil for a while. Phil's current hobbies include writing (both articles and code), riding motorcycles, reading historical fiction, and keeping his children amused. The Solaris-specific part of his website is http://www.bolthole.com/solaris. Most of his writing until this point has been done online, for free. His website has a particular wealth of Solaris information, and includes a mix of script writing, driver code, and Solaris sysadmin resources. As far as books go, he was only a prepublication reviewer for Solaris Systems Programming, Rich Teer. However, the first time any of his articles got published was in Rainbow magazine (a publication for the Tandy Color Computer) on page 138 of the May 1989 issue, under a column named Tools for Programming BASIC09 (http://ia700809.us.archive.org/26/items/rainbowmagazine-1989-05/The_Rainbow_Magazine_05_1989_text.pdf).
Read more about Philip P. Brown

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