Blastwave is a community effort, hosted at www.blastwave.org, to provide pre-packaged software for Solaris. Their packages are for Solaris 8, and thus work on versions 8, 9, 10 and OpenSolaris, and are available both for SPARC and x86. All packages for both architectures are 32-bit, but will run on 64-bit Solaris kernels as well, such as those used on sun4u SPARCs and Athlon64 or Opteron systems.

Most of the Blastwave packages are fairly current, and include most of the usual suspects: OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, GNU awk, Python and many other useful tools. Versions of GNOME, KDE and XFCE are available too, though the XFCE packages are for version 4.2, not the current stable, 4.4. There's even a few games, including Armagetron, BZFlag, Slash'EM and NetHack.

Blastwave provides the pkg-get tool, which downloads and installs requested packages, performing automated dependency resolution. It also supports upgrading installed packages.

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