I've been fiddling with OpenSolaris lately, and one obviously require package is dearly missed: Emacs. I tried to compile it myself, but couldn't get "configure" to pass, so I decided to look around for alternatives. It turns out SunFreeware has a prebuilt Emacs package, somewhat suitable for OpenSolaris. So, not knowing anything about the IPS system, I fumbled around a bit, until I figured out that the following commands added this repository (or authority I think it's called):

% pfexec pkg image-create -F -a sunfreeware.com=http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000 /var/sunfreeware
% pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000 sunfreeware.com
% pfexec pkg refresh --full
# Now I can run
% pfexec pkg search -r emacs
% pfexec pkg install pkg://IPSFWemacs   # Copied from above search results

This version of emacs is a bit old (21.x), and it doesn't seem to work when started with an X11 window. But at least I don't have to suffer with vi any more.

Update: I made an OpenSolaris package with Emacs v22.2 for x86, which has both X11 support (emacs) and a non-X11 version (emacs-nox). The tar ball with the package is available on my FTP site. This might be a usable alternative of Emacs until the official OpenSolaris IPS adds an emacs package.

I've been playing around with Solaris today, and it's just as good as I remember (except still missing all the tools I need, like Emacs). However, I was unable to NFS mount my home directory from my RHEL4 box. I would get an error like

bash-3.00# mount -o ro machine.ogre.com:/export/disk /foo/bar
nfs mount: mount: /foo/bar: Not owner

and my /var/adm/messages would have

Apr  3 22:22:36 solaris10 nfs: [ID 435675 kern.warning] WARNING: NFS server initial call to
                                               machine failed: Not owner

RHEL4 does NFS v4 (or so it thinks at least), and Solaris is not happy with something there. Obviously there must be a way to get it to work, but right now, I just needed to get it working. So, until I figure out what in NFS v4 is causing this, I decided to make Solaris just use NFS v3. There's a couple of ways to do this, easiest is to just use the vers=3 option to mount, e.g. in /etc/auto_home do something like

leif    -rw,vers=3      machine:/export/home/leif

Or, you can change the defaults in Solaris 10, by editing /etc/default/nfs, and modify

NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX=3

After changing this default, you have to run

# svcadm refresh svc:/network/nfs/client:default

Alternatively, you could probably also disable NFS v4 on the RHEL4 box.