Package Manager Cheatsheet

This matrix lists common tasks and the command arguments to perform the task with dpkg, rpm, apt, and yum. Note that apt and yum are really front-end tools for managing packages with dpkg and rpm. The RPM-oriented commands are known to work on Red Hat/Fedora; Mandrake, SUSE, etc are unknown, as some ship slightly older versions. urpmi is not included because I don't have a Mandrake installation to test it on. SysV packages are included because I'm using Solaris again frequently.

http://nakedape.cc/wiki/PackageManagerCheatsheet

Make backspace work in Solaris shell

From: http://osnews.com/comments/19715

> > And they're going to update the default shell to understand
> > the backspace key
> Thank god. Having the backspace key spew out useless junk
> instead of deleting characters is a personal irritant.
>
It doesn't take too much time to type "stty erase <backspace>"
into your shell's .rc file...

Right.

OTOH I really like this comment:

RE[3]: Finally!
by sbergman27 (3.96) on Tue 6th May 2008 22:25 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Finally!"

If it would fail gracefully and not do anything that would be one thing, but it doesn't. It spits out characters.

It's certainly a different day and age today. :-) I've seen so much:

\E[23~
\[7m
\E[!p\E[?3;4l\E[4l\E>

in my time. Fixed so many broken terminfo and termcap definitions. Diagnosed so many flow control glitches and mismatched terminal settings on AT&T 4410s and 605s and Wyse50s and Wyse60s. Done so much blind typing into terinals whose screen contents were completely unrecognizable, that when I see a few strange characters, it takes my brain a moment to recognize that there is actually something wrong.

There are only really two important terminal types that I work with today, and those are "linux" and "xterm". And those work so consistently well these days that I can fully understand the surprise that the non-graybeards must experience when a key isn't mapped right. It's a sign that some of the more stupid crap I used to have to deal with is now truly history. Or at least a rarity. Praise the Lord! (And I'm an atheist!)

The backspace thing was, indeed, an embarrassing issue for the year 2008. Especially since, if I understand correctly, it was not a matter of the erase character not being set, but of the shell not handling the defined erase character properly. But it *does* seem to be history. I'm not sure what the old config was, but when I bring up gnome-terminal in 2008.05 I get bash, and the backspace works just fine. I was expecting to be able to ctrl-alt-F1 to check out a text console, but that doesn't seem to be the right key sequence. Unix is Unix is Unix[1]... except for all those little things we take for granted about our usual flavor. :0

[1] That would be "POSIX-like OS is POSIX-like OS is POSIX-like OS" for you anal retentives regarding Linux not being Unix. But even you have to admit it loses something in the translation. ;-)

Updated: May 11th 2008

Package Manager in new OpenSolaris

A nice demo with overview of basic package management in upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.05:
http://frsun.downloads.edgesuite.net/sun/08D12331/index.html

I can't resist observations that:

• default Package Manager looks like streamlined Synaptic
  (one of the best!)


• package management written in Python reminds me of Gentoo


• the whole idea of multiple repositories reminds me of Debian


• package management Python tools remind me of dpkg on steroids


• Ian Murdock works for Sun right now, and he is behind all of this ;-)

So I'd say they took the best ideas and people so far.
I hope the end result will be equally great as well!

Mounting Solaris CDROMs

http://bolthole.com/solaris/mount-cdrom.html

Secure LDAP for Solaris

http://bolthole.com/solaris/LDAP.html

Solaris hints

http://bolthole.com/solaris/

Mounting ISO images on Solaris

http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2003-January/002959.html

SUN Solaris packages

http://www.linuks.mine.nu/solaris/

Freeware for Solaris

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/
http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Information on OpenBoot

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=130778

Solaris 9 System Startup and Shutdown

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=101659