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

Then:

 alias locate=glocate

Either wait for 3am to roll around or run that gupdatedb command as root. It runs as the daemon user by default for security purposes (it won't index your 0600 chmodded pr0n).