Solaris tricks

Page containing various magical things that I've learned about opensolaris in my quest to get it working as I want it.

Making Alt-Tab (and other mod1 related bindings) work

I use x2x to send keyboard input to my opensolaris box. It's an Ultra 80 with a Sun Type 4 keyboard. However, the machine I x2x from is a PC with an IBM Type-M keyboard. By default, any shortcuts using the alt key don't work. However, if on the PC you run the following command:

 xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L"

It should fix the issues with shortcuts using alt. This works better than using xmodmap on the sun machine. I'm not sure why but I'm not gonna argue.

Using the xterm-color terminfo file

The xterm that comes with solaris, like so many of the bundled applications, sucks. I've installed a better version from pkgsrc. To get solaris to find the terminfo file for xterm-color I've added the following to my ~/.zshrclocal (a file I use for per-machine shell configuration/overrides):

 export TERMINFO=/usr/pkg/share/lib/terminfo

 if [ $TERM = xterm ]; then
   export TERM=xterm-color
 fi

Making man(1) not suck so much

Install misc/less from pkgsrc

 alias more=less
 export PAGER=less
 export MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/pkg/man

Getting a locate command on the system

Install sysutils/findutils. Edit root's crontab (sudo crontab -e root or whatever)

 1 3 * * * /usr/pkg/bin/gupdatedb --netuser=nobody

Then:

 alias locate=glocate

Either wait for 3am to roll around or run that gupdatedb command as root (--netuser restricts the database to files readable by nobody for security reasons).