Blastwave
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blastwave.org is an organisation which prepares and packages open source software for the Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system.
Blastwave is the home of multiple Solaris-oriented projects, including CSW or "Community Software for Solaris". The objective of the CSW project is to allow Solaris users to freely have pre-packaged software in accordance with specified standards. Software is in SVR4 compliant packages and ready to run via the pkg-get tool. This process includes a testing stage, open evaluation and bug reporting and final release to a "unstable" and "stable" tree much like the Debian project.
The Blastwave build stack is a set of servers that houses the build environment. This stack allows members of the Solaris Community to gain access to both tools and expertise such that they may build software in accordance with standards. To date there are some 1,600+ software packages for both the SPARC and x86/AMD architectures that support Solaris. The software is built to support Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 and Solaris 10. Solaris Express as well as Solaris Express Community Edition are not officially supported however the CSW software set is reported to work well. It should be noted that the older sun4m Sun hardware architecture is officially supported as well as the latest generation Sun UltraSPARC hardware and multi-core Opteron implementations.
The CSW software set from Blastwave is available for free to anyone who can download it. Corporations are encouraged to become a sponsor, or donate towards the project. All funds go towards the long term operation of the project as well as towards related open source sites (genunix.org for example) and initiatives. The software on the mirrors sites as well as the Blastwave DVD is best installed via the pkg-get utility. The pkg-get utility operates much like the Debian project apt-get in that applications are fetched from a software source and then a dependency tree is traversed also. This ensures that a complete software suite may be installed with a single simple command line. Software is available world wide from over forty mirror sites.
