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Installing Manual pages in Solaris

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In order to view man pages for various commands in Solaris it is necessary to have two packages installed (SUNWman and SUNWdoc).

    SUNWman - Online Manual Pages SUNWdoc - Documentation Tools

Using the man man command we can quickly determine if the the above packages are installed. If man returns either of the following:

man: command not found
No manual entry for man

then you have one or both of the required packages missing:

You could as easily determined which if any of the packages are already installed by using the pkginfo command:

# pkginfo SUNWdoc
# pkginfo SUNWman

If they are not present in your system you can install them from Solaris media.

Installing from media using vold

The Volume Manager (vold) daemon in Sun Solaris will automatically detect and mount a CDROM when inserted on Sun Solaris under /cdrom

For this example I am using Solaris 8 media

  1. Insert the Solaris media into your CD/DVD-Rom drive
  2. Allow vold to automatically mount the media
  3. Install the packages: 
    # pkgadd -d /cdrom/cdrom0/Solaris_8/Product SUWman
# pkgadd -d /cdrom/cdrom0/Solaris_8/Product SUNWdoc

Manually mount media

If you have disabled vold you can still install the packages by manually mounting the Solaris media and running the pkgadd command.

  1. Mount the CD/DVD-Rom: 
    # mount -F hsfs /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s2 /mnt
    where c0t6d0s2 is the identifier of your CD/DVD-Rom drive and may differ from system to system.
  2. Install the packages: 
    # pkgadd -d /mnt/Solaris_8/Product SUNWman
# pkgadd -d /mnt/Solaris_8/Product SUNWdoc

Alternately install from the network repository using:

pkgadd -d /path/to/your/solaris/packages SUNWdoc SUNWman