While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps.

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris 2008.11 includes improvements around software package management and incorporating community packaging efforts. The updates to the free Solaris-based OS shows that Sun will not follow IBM and HP in letting Linux take over the platform space once dominated by Unix.

Adept is the graphical package management program included with Kubuntu, which is also available for Debian and other Linux distributions that use the apt package management system.

I’m a Debian user and—like many—I use apt and its associated tools. If you haven’t yet discovered apt here’s a brief summary of some of it and some of its tools which can make your package management even more powerful.

"The psmisc package is probably installed on almost all Debian and Ubuntu installations and contains a number of small tools related to process management on Unix systems. Namely, these are pstree, killall, fuser and peekfd. Below follows a short description of these useful tools. While everybody certainly knows killall and probably pstree, the package also contains fuser and peekfd, which were new to me until very recently (though I hear at least fuser is an age-old tool. Shame on me.) ..."

Last week, in Part One of this Debian Package Primer, I gave you an introduction to the super cow powers of apt-get, Debian’s package management system. This week, in Part Two, you’ll check out aptitude, which is an easy to use front-end for apt-get. It has menus, shortcuts and a package status dashboard that keeps you aware of your installed packages and how many you have yet to install.

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies.

Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris.