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.

As a die-hard Emacs users, I can't survive using my browser without Emacs bindings. After I upgraded to Firefox PR1, almost all of those bindings where MIA. The pain! Fortunately, after consulting with the good peeps at irc.mozilla.org, I was told that Firefox now honors the Gnome/GTK settings for key "themes".

Depending on your version of Gnome, you can change the setting by going to the control center and use the Keyboard Shortcuts panel. This does not seem to work in the latest Gnome version, at least my v2.8 installation of Gnome doesn't have the appropriate settings in this configuration panel.

So, in my case, I had to fire up gconf-editor manually, and edit the Key named /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme. I changed the value from default to Emacs, and after restarting Firefox, everything was cool again.