The files on this site are Sun Packages that have been compressed with GNU Zip. I suggest that you study the pkgadd and/or admintool man pages and AnswerBook entries if you are not familiar with installing packages under Solaris 2.5, 2.6, 7-10. Also, see the comments below about potential problems you may face during installation. The TeX package also requires some special care in installation due to its complexity and size.
See our FAQ for further details on installation and problems.
Note that people who attempt to download these files to Windows machines running Internet Explorer, with or without virus scanners, tend to have a lot of problems with file corruption. If you must download to a PC running Windows, try to use Netscape or do just a straight ftp. Make sure you check the file size of the .gz files you get. If you do not get the correct size, it is probable that your Windows software corrupted the file. It makes much more sense to download directly to your Solaris machines anyway. See Q16 in the FAQ.
File notation for Solaris 2.6, 7-10 and now some Solaris 2.5.x entries is indicated as:
gcc-2.8.1-sol26-sparc-local.gz
program name-version-os-processor-directory installed in.gz
You can download files in two ways - from your browser or via anonymous ftp. If you are going to use your browser, go to a file link in the center of the sunfreeware.com screen and and click on the file name. Depending on your browser's configuration, a file save dialog box will pop up and you can select the place you want to send the file. Sometimes, the file dialog box will not pop up and a strange looking set of characters will show up in the center frame. To avoid this, you can hold down the shift key while you click on the file link. This will force a file dialog box.
If you are using a browser that does not behave this way, check the documentation on how to download a file.
It is possible that if you have gunzip installed on your system, a downloaded .gz file will be gunzipped during download.
If you want to use anonymous ftp, you can do something like the following session. (Note that if you are reading this from one of the mirror sites, there may be a closer ftp site available. If you hold your cursor over a file link, you should find the name of the ftp machine at your mirror site. You can also look at the FTP/Mirror sites link at the left to find a closer ftp site.)
[179] steve> ftp ftp.sunfreeware.com Connected to ftp.sunfreeware.com. 220 ftp.sunfreeware.com FTP server ready. Name (ftp.sunfreeware.com:steve): anonymous 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: 230- 230-============================================== 230-This is the ftp.sunfreeware.com ftp server 230- 230-If you have not already done so, make sure 230-you have read the Downloading/Installation, 230-FAQ, and Disclaimer links on 230-http://sunfreeware.com. 230- 230-This is a restricted access system. All 230-transfers are logged. If you disagree 230-with this practice, log off now. 230- 230-Questions go to Steve Christensen at 230-sunfreeware.com contact list. 230-============================================== 230- 230- 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. ftp> bin 200 Type set to I. ftp> cd pub/freeware 250 CWD command successful. ft>pYou can then go to either the SOURCES, intel, or sparc directory and then the Solaris number subdirectory you need. Then, do a get on the file you need.
If you have problems, do not waste time. Send me the details of the problems you might be having. It is useful to send the results of:
ls -al
head
file
to help interpret any problem.
There can be periodic network interruptions on the Internet. If you have problems with connections or downloads, wait a few hours and try again or try one of the mirror sites.
To install a file you have downloaded, follow the example here:
For example, if you were to download a gzipped package foo-1.00-sol8-sparc-local.gz
into directory /tmp, to install this package, you would
use the following commands:
The pkgadd command must be run as root. Do NOT put
a ., ./, or the directory name in front
of the file name in pkgadd!
This could create a new directory, /usr/local (the actual name
of the new directory would depend on the package).
If the package installs in /usr/local/bin, you must put /usr/local/bin (or /opt/foo/bin when
programs install in /opt/foo) in your UNIX
PATH. You will also probably want to add /usr/local/man
to your MANPATH in a similar way. See your Solaris manual on how to do this for the shell program
you are using.
Documentation and other relevant files have been included to the best of our abilities. If you have problems with installation or execution, we want to hear about it, but we cannot assure you that we can solve your problem. Please contact the author's if there is a bug in the program itself.
Before doing any of this, you should back up your /opt or /usr/local directory fully!
By default the pkgadd program will create directories in /opt or /usr/local for the packaged software. On some systems the disk space allocated to these directories is too small. If you have enough space elsewhere you can either move some of the things you have in /opt or /usr/local there or move /opt or /usr/local there entirely. For example, suppose you have a directory on another disk called /solaris2. Create a directory called /solaris2/local and after moving your /usr/local directories to /solaris2/local, delete (careful here), your /usr/local directory and then do a
ln -s /solaris2/local /usr/local
and make sure it is accessible by anyone who needs it. If you do
not feel expert enough to do this, have a system administrator
guide you through it or recommend another procedure.
You can now use pkgadd.
It is also possible for the /var/tmp or /var/spool/pkg
directories to be too small. You can follow the same sort of technique as
above to remedy this. For more detail on this see FAQ Q14.
See also FAQ Q9.
The texmf package for Solaris 2.5 consists of executable binaries, scripts, macros and compiled fonts for a basic installation of TeX and METAFONT. The binaries also work under Solaris 2.4 and 2.3. The package includes Tomas Rokicki's dvips interpreter for PostScript laser printers and Paul Vojta's xdvi for screen display of typeset documents. Macro packages provide the user with access to plain Tex, LaTeX (LaTeX2e as well as the obsolescent LaTeX209), AMSTeX and eplain. A number of source-validation utilities is also available.
Installation Overview.
For a general overview of the initial steps leading to installation, see the printed or online documentation for any SunSoft package. The essential steps are
This package should be installed with the Solaris utility pkgadd.
You will need almost 50 Megabytes of temporary storage for the spool location, and the same amount for the permanent installation. The default spool location on a Solaris system is /var/spool/pkg, but many systems will not have reserved enough space in the /var partition to put so large a spool file there.
If you are able to use /var/spool/pkg as your spool directory type pkgadd, and select the texmf package at the appropriate prompt.
If you need to use a different location (e. g. /tmp/pkg)
type
pkgadd -d < spooldir >
The preinstall script creates a pseudo-user [default name texmf], with a [default] home directory /opt/texmf. If the user texmf exists already, however, no changes will be made to the entry in the passwd file. The password field for texmf is set initially to LOCKED
During the install phase the ./texmf tree is unpacked into $BASEDIR (default /opt), so that the whole package is rooted in $BASEDIR/texmf (default /opt/texmf). You may find it useful to define the environment variable TEXMF to point to this directory.
The install script then changes directory to /opt/texmf/var, and runs the following
tar cf - ./texmf | (cd /var ; tar xvfp -)
The purpose of this is to place all files which must be edited into a separate file hierarchy so that the directories in $TEXMF can normally be treated as write-only.
After installation you should
Edit /var/texmf/dvips/config.ps to match your printer. If you need guidance for this, you will find it in the manual for dvips, which is in $TEXMF/doc/dvips. The manual has been sectioned into ten-page sections so that it should run through even a memory-starved PostScript printer
Add to your .login or .cshrc file:
a) $TEXMF/bin to your path
b) $TEXMF/doc/man to your $MANPATH
c) setenv TEXMF /opt/texmf
I have provided format and base files for tex, latex and mf (cmmf is no longer advisable, and is certainly not needed on a sparc platform).
This entire distribution uses Karl Berry's path-searching code to discover all the various classes of files needed in preparing a TeX or LaTeX document. If you do not know about kpathsea, please read the manual provided in $TEXMF/doc/kpathsea. Path-searching can be done with the aid of a simple database (the file ls -R) or through the entire tree branching out from $TEXMF. The search through ls -R is very fast; the search through the actual file tree is often slow. Moreover, the present version of kpathsea cannot follow symbolic links which occur in the middle of the path but the database ls -R takes care of that problem.
There is a basic ls -R file covering the /opt/texmf tree in $TEXMF. If your instance of $TEXMF does not point to /opt/texmf you will need to refresh this file.
See $TEXMF/doc/help/README.TeX3.14159 for instructions on refreshing ls -R.
The configuration for path searching file is /var/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf If your instance of $TEXMF does not point to /opt/texmf you will need to edit this file and change the expansion of TEXMF there.
At this point you should be up and running.
A basic set of rasterized Computer Modern fonts is supplied, along with some others used by LaTeX and AMSTeX. As soon as you begin setting anything but the most basic documents, you will find that both dvips and xdvi call a system utility MakeTeXPK to supply additional rasterizations. These fonts will not, of course, be included in the ls -R database once they are made, and this will cause kpathsea to go into its slower mode. The system manager should therefore arrange for a crontab entry which will refresh ls -R every night.
A small number of Adobe type 1 outline fonts is available on a Solaris system with a pass-through license for use with the system. These are represented through symbolic links in the $TEXMF tree so that documents can be set in Times-Roman, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol fonts with the appropriate macros. LaTeX is set up to allow the use of these four typefaces in the most basic styles. The use of outline fonts in LaTeX is very much under development at present so there is every possibility that newer documents will require adjustments of the font style files. See $TEXMF/doc/latex/base/fntguide.ps* for further guidance. Screen display of documents containing outline fonts may require the generation of screen bitmaps, which in this distribution is done through ps2pk. Another resource is ghostscript which is also available on the archive of freeware for Solaris 2.5.
Notes for Solaris 2.4 and 2.3 users.
The version of pkgadd available with these versions of Solaris does not permit you to change BASEDIR during installation. If you are not able to use the default BASEDIR ( /opt) you will have to go into the < spooldir > /texmf directory and edit the relevant line in pkginfo before you run pkgadd.
In Solaris 2.4 one of the base libraries used by xdvi (libc.so.1) lacks a reference to the old BSD getwd routine. This reference is available in the Solaris 2.5 version of libc.so.1. The absence of this reference makes xdvi crash when the FILES button is used---otherwise it does not affect the use of xdvi.
There are two possible workarounds, other than installing Solaris 2.5. Either take great care NOT to use the FILES button, or try adding /usr/ucblib to the users' LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment. The general consensus on the net is that it is better to avoid using the FILES button.
TeX contact:
Pierre A. MacKay
Department of Classics, Box 353110
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
mackay "at" cs "dot" washington "dot" edu