Re: [Evolution] Installation on Solaris 8

[Mark Gordon <mtgordon ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-12-27 at 22:50, Dale & Lora Marshall wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> I've been looking over the web pages and the knowledge base,
> and haven't quite figured out how to do this.
>
> I have a workstation I'd like to install Evolution on to test.
> The problem is this... it's on an internal network and not
> connected in any way to the Internet.  It's running Solaris 8
> 02/02.  I have downloaded lots of packages from the Ximian website,
> but we don't have Gnome in-house, and I don't have the RPM
> program to do packages.
>
> How do I go about installing Evolution?  Where do I need to go
> to get the required software?  Since I'll just be testing and
> there's no guarantee we'll ever use the product (even though it
> looks great on the website), I don't want to spend the money to
> buy the CD if I don't have to.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
>
> - Dale

Solaris installs are tricky.  We want rpm in order to track dependency
information, but it's not native to Solaris.  If you check the go-gnome
shell script used by the online install, you will note the following
install process for Solaris:

- the script notices that it's running on Solaris
- it checks to see whether you have an rpm database where we would
expect one
- if it's not there, it downloads a tarball of what amounts to an empty
rpm database and installs that
- it then downloads and launches a binary installer which statically
links librpm.

The CD install is almost identical, except that it looks in local
directories rather than trying to download.  You may want to check the
instructions at
http://www.ximian.com/products/desktop/download.html?distribution=localmedia

Now that I look at them, I suspect they may be a bit lacking on Solaris,
in that they don't mention the rpm database install.  You can do that
manually, though; the script is pretty clear in that regard.

-Mark Gordon