For easy access to OpenCSW programs, put /opt/csw/bin in front of PATH, and /opt/csw/share/man in front of MANPATH. On Solaris 10, you can do that by editing the /etc/default/login file, uncomment the PATH and SUPATH variables definition, adjust the values as required and log out and back in.
OpenCSW tries to avoid providing binaries which clash with those in /usr/bin. Coreutils get a prefix for all the binary names, e.g. cp becomes gcp. Some packages provide symlinks with original file names, from the /opt/csw/gnu directory, for example /opt/csw/gnu/cp is a symlink to /opt/csw/bin/gcp. You can put /opt/csw/gnu in front of your PATH.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is an environment variable which can be used to make the dynamic linker look for shared libraries in specific places. It is not necessary to set it for OpenCSW binaries. All of them are built with the -R flag, so each binary itself knows where to look for the shared objects.
You do not need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH system-wide; and if you do, you will likely break your system, even to the point of locking yourself out. Some of the library names clash between /usr/lib and /opt/csw/lib, and if you run the Solaris openssh daemon with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to /opt/csw/lib, /usr/lib/ssh/sshd will try to load libcrypto from /opt/csw/lib and fail to start.
For more information see LD_LIBRARY_PATH - just say no.
You need to take care to keep your packages up to date. It doesn’t happen automatically out of the box. To upgrade packages, run:
pkgutil -U -u -y
To automate this process across multiple hosts, you can use a configuration management system like puppet.
There are two locations where configuration files are stored. This may look confusing at first, the reason is that we try to support both sparse zones and full zones as good as possible. Remember that in a sparse root environment /opt is shared from the global zone. As a rule of thumb configuration files which are specific to a zone are kept in /etc/opt/csw which is also generally preferred (these are in fact most of the configuration files), whereas /opt/csw/etc is used for configuration files which are globally set. Some packages honour both locations, where the global /opt/csw/etc is read first and can be customized by /etc/opt/csw, but this is specific to the package as not all upstream software allows this easily.
There are some exceptions like Apache, where the configuration files are historically in /opt/csw/apache2/etc, but these are likely to go away some time.
pkgutil can use two configuration files:
This may seem confusing, the reason why there are two is that it is possible to run OpenCSW in a sparse root environment where /opt is not writable. In this scenario you use configurations in /opt/csw/etc for global settings and /etc/opt/csw for zone-specific setting. Both pkgutil.conf are identical on installation with all configuration options commented out, so you can just pick one for now. As a rule of thumb it is recommended to prefer the more prominent /etc/opt/csw.
Configuration files are usually shipped as template with a .CSW suffix which is copied during installation to the native name without the suffix. This file is meant to be user-adjustable. On package deinstallation or update the template is deinstalled whereas the configuration file without suffix is kept unless it hasn’t been modified.