Solaris 8 comes with only a subset of the tools that you will need to get useful stuff done. Here is a list of additional programs that you should install.

Binary distributions

The site http://sunfreeware.com/ (Mirror site ftp://mirrors/xmission.com/sunfreeware contains binary distributions for a number of useful programs. Sunfreeware has packages in Sun Package format, which is sort of like Linux RPM. http://www.sunfreeware.com/download.html describes how to install, basically, on a Windows machine, I point my browser to http://www.sunfreeware.com and find the url to the Solaris 8 package that I want, and then log on to the Unix machine and use the wget package to copy the package file over.

Using wget saves having to copy the file by hand from the Windows client and can be a big win when logged in remotely via dsl and working on the Unix server.
If you do not have wget, then download the package file to the local machine and use scp Say I wanted to install gdb. The URL is ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/sparc/8/gdb-5.0-sol8-sparc-local.gz

I would log in to bennett and cd to /export/home/tools and do

                                                                         
wget ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/sparc/8/gdb-5.0-sol8-sparc-local.gz

That will get the package file. I then ungzip it:

   gunzip gdb-5.0-sol8-sparc-local.gz  

And then run pkgadd:

   pkgadd -d gdb-5.0-sol8-sparc-local   

Make sure you get at least the following:

• bash
• emacs
• gcc
  If you run out of space with messages about reloc while install gcc, then try expanding the package. Tek-tips says:

  #> cd /tmp (or where you put the program file)
  #> gunzip program-1.00-local.gz
  #> mkdir /tmp/spool (this can be any directory in a place with a lot of disk space)
  #> pkgadd -s /tmp/spool -d program-1.00-local
  #> cd /tmp/spool
  #> pkgadd -d . 
  

• perl - Mailman uses it mailman_N/mail/*truncating_wrapper* and Bugzilla Use it.
• python - Mailman needs it
• tcl
• top
• gawk - awk has line length limits that break scripts that read the apache logs.
• wget - not strictly necessary, but wget is a way to download files w/o starting up a browser.

Note that there is no need to install gzip, it is already included in Solaris 8.

There is no need to install tcsh, it is already included. You may want to create a link in /usr/local/bin that points to /bin/tcsh and add /usr/local/bin/tcsh to /etc/shells

Yassp includes Openssh, but the version in Yassp is probably out of date. See What about SSH? for instructions on upgrading ssh.

CVS

CVS is usually installed by downloading from http://www.sunfreeware.com, see How do I install CVS? for details.

Kerberos

Gigasource used to require Kerberos so that it could log out and connect to the departmental account server and get unique uids. See the Infrax Kerberos Page for details.
However, it is no longer necessary to set up Kerberos.