Ok, so I've already described an attempt to get a minimal installation of Solaris. That worked - the system boots, command line applications run, and I can log in and manage it.
And the minimal installation gave me enough capability to run real-world services such as web servers - and tomcat, having downloaded a java virtual machine.
What I want to do next is work out what packages I need in order to get additional classes of application to work. So I'm working up from the base.
Java will run well enough to run tomcat, but as soon as I try and run a swing gui it fails:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /packages/java/versions/j2sdk1.4.2_07/jre/lib/sparc/motif21/libmawt.so: ld.so.1: /packages/java/versions/j2sdk1.4.2_07/bin/java: fatal: libXm.so.4: open failed: No such file or directory
which was obviously going to happen, as I deliberately did not install any X11 or motif applications or libraries. So, I need the following:
SUNWdtcor SUNWctpls SUNWmfrun SUNWxwplt
(SUNWxwplt wants SUNWxwdv, SUNWxwfnt, SUNWxwice, SUNWcpp, SUNWxwrtl, and SUNWxwplr. That makes sense on a server, I think, but not on a client where all I want is the libraries.)
At this point, my basic java swing app actually runs, without errors. So that's pretty good. In order to give me a slightly more useful X11 environment I added the following:
SUNWxwopt SUNWxwrtl
If nothing else, this gives me xterm. At this point, I have enough of X to enable the traditional X clients (and motif applications like nedit) to run fine, in addition to Java.
First failure is:
make: Command not found.
OK, so back to adding packages - I need tools and headers (the actual compilers I have installed separately):
SUNWcpp SUNWsprot SUNWhea SUNWxwinc
And my software compiles (and yes, it uses X11 in places). If I didn't have the compilers available via NFS I would have added SUNWgcc as well.
At this point I have a system that looks like a Solaris system and works fine, and allows me to run command line applications, X11 and Motif clients, Java in both graphical and non-graphical mode, and allows me to build my own applications.
All this with 10% of the standard number of packages that Solaris installs, with a corresponding reduction in disk usage and improvement in installation and patching time.