Somebody Please help?

joc_06

Im going mad here.
Using Solaris and i want to do something simple like download an app and install and run it.
How do i do it?
Alright starting with emacs editor.
I downloaded the .tar.gz file.
Now i need to unzip it using the command gunzip right,
then untar it -- how?

what do i do then??
I hate unix. I hate it!!

Rew

gunzip file.tar.gz
tar -xvf file.tar

after that depends on the app

joc_06

can you help me with emacs so specifically?
What do i do with the files. There's no .exe is there?

Rew

Actually I know nothing about emacs, just never croped up in the time iv been using *nix

File extensions mean nothing to Solaris. If you downloaded a source install you will need to compile it. If its a binary there should be a bin directory with executables in it. There must be docs with it though. Generally RTFM is your best bet starting off.

Syth

Rew wrote:

gunzip file.tar.gz
tar -xvf file.tar

Actually you can combine the two.
tar -zxvf file.tar.gz or tar -jxvf file.tar.bz2

joc_06 wrote:

can you help me with emacs so specifically?
What do i do with the files. There's no .exe is there?

Unix doesn't use .exe file extensions for exectutables.

There should be nothing special about emacs. It looks like you've got a source tarball (as they are called). So you'll need to compile it. As there are a billion and 2 different forms fo Unix, files could be all over the place. There should be a script called configure. Run that and it'll find out where everthing is. "make" will compile your programme (assuming your configure went OK). And then "make install" (as root) will move all the files from that folder to where they should go in the filesystem. That should do it.

There should be a file called README and one called INSTALL in the unzipped tarball that you should read first.

tomk

joc_06 wrote:

I hate unix. I hate it!!

Going slightly OT here, but are you required to use Solaris for work? If so, do you not have access to sysadmins or other tech folk who can help you? If not, why not try a more user-friendly *nix variant?

Syth

joc_06 wrote:

I hate unix. I hate it!!

Now that I know Unix, I love it. It makes more sense.

nadir

unix rules!
I just started admining a fedora bugzilla server at work, and Im getting my own linux box tomorrow, man I'd be so screwed if I didn't know *nix, esp. since all the production servers run solaris.
Must be rather confusing for windows heads to be dumped with *nix boxes // its kinda funny cause management tend not to understand the difference, they just think tech stuff , Ill put a techie in charge!!
little do they know,
what can I say man, enjoy the learning curve

joc_06

Syth wrote:

Now that I know Unix, I love it. It makes more sense.

Ah its not too bad. Im only using it a week after a few years on windows.

Im not a sysadmin. Im an ic designer so i dont really need to know anything about it really.
I'll get the hang of it after a little while more but at the mo its tough.

Syth

joc_06 wrote:

Ah its not too bad. Im only using it a week after a few years on windows.

Im not a sysadmin. Im an ic designer so i dont really need to know anything about it really.
I'll get the hang of it after a little while more but at the mo its tough.

Hey, I'm just a college student playing around with it. Give it a while. You weren't good at Windows the first time? The asdvantage of Windows is that you can sit down at it and try something, click something and you learn a little. Unix just sits there. Waiting for you. So it can be hard at first. Try reading some beginner guides, like RUTE, and you'll feel more comfortable.

When you learn about sed, awk, perl, grep and shell scripting and all those wonderful little tools that combined together can do pretty impressive stuff then you learn to love Unix.

fishfoodie

The best source of pre-compiled applications for Solaris is, sunfreeware.com.

It has a mirror on heanet.ie which is a lot faster than the main site.

The best part is that the site holds .depot files, which are Sun's standard file package for applications.

To install one, you download a the gzipped depot file to a temp directory, cd to the temp directory, unzip the file & then do a 'pkgadd -d filename.depot' for the file.

This way all the files go in the right place & you get nice warnings if your missing a pre-requesite or something.

Easy peasey !

fishfoodie

I forgot to say.

I have about 40,000 sets of Solaris manuals in work. I've never actually looked in any so I dont know if there actually worth using, but if your in Dublin I can probably give you a set :-)