Installation and Configuration

The following sections provide a brief overview of the installation and packaging technologies in the Oracle Solaris 11 operating system. See the corresponding documents for detailed information about these topics.

Installing the OS

The Oracle Solaris 11 OS provides several installation options to install the OS depending on your system's environment and requirements. You can install from Live Media, the text installer, or the Automated Installer (AI). See the Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages guide for detailed instructions on installing the Oracle Solaris 11 OS.

Image Packaging System

After the OS has been installed on your system, you can download additional software packages, including developer tools, by using the Image Packaging System (IPS). IPS accesses software packages from networked repositories and then installs them on your system.

IPS enables you to download and install packages using either the command line or the Package Manager. The Package Manager is the graphical user interface (GUI) for IPS.

The software packages are available in the release repository at http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/en/index.shtml. Customers who buy support packages for the Oracle Solaris 11 OS will be provided access to a support repository.

See the Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages for detailed information about installing and updating packages.

Starting the Package Manager

Package Manager provides a subset of the tasks that can be performed from the command line:

• List, search, install, update, and remove packages

• Add and configure package repositories

• Activate, rename, and remove boot environments. For information on boot environments, see the Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.1 Boot Environments document.

Tool bar

Click the Package Manager icon in the tool bar. The Package Manager icon is a box with a circling arrow.

Desktop icon

Double-click the Package Manager icon on the desktop.

Menu bar

Choose System⇒Administration⇒Package Manager.

Command line

$ /usr/lib/pm-launch packagemanager

For complete Package Manager documentation, choose Help⇒Contents from the Package Manager menu bar.

Introduction to Boot Environments

A boot environment is a bootable instance of the Oracle Solaris operating system image along with any other software packages installed in that image. You can maintain multiple boot environments on your systems, and each boot environment can have different software versions installed. Software updates can be performed without any risk of loss of data or system environment, because you can take a backup of the current environment. You can also update a boot environment that is not currently active. The beadm(1) utility is used to create and manage boot environments.

See Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.1 Boot Environments for detailed information about boot environments.

Distribution Constructor

The distribution constructor is a command-line tool for building preconfigured Oracle Solaris images and Virtual Machine images. The tool takes an XML manifest file as input and builds an ISO image or Virtual Machine image that is based on the parameters specified in the manifest file. An ISO image is an archive file, also known as a disc image, of an optical disc, in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Optionally, a USB image can be created based on a generated x86 ISO image. Depending on the image configuration, these ISO or USB images can be bootable. They can be installed on a system or run in a live media environment. An ISO image can be burned to a CD or DVD. A USB image can be copied to a flash drive.

Required Packages

To start using the distribution constructor application, install the distribution constructor package on your system. You can install the package using the Package Manager, or through the command line. Type the following command to install the package from the command line:

# pkg install distribution-constructor