Solaris has long been well-supported by Nmap. Sun even donated a complete SPARCstation to the project, which is still being used to test new Nmap builds. For this reason, many Solaris users compile and install from source code as described in the section called “Unix Compilation and Installation from Source Code”.

Users who prefer native Solaris packages will be pleased to learn that Steven Christensen does an excellent job of maintaining Nmap packages at http://www.sunfreeware.com for all modern Solaris versions and architectures. Instructions are on his site, and are generally very simple: download the appropriate Nmap package for your version of Solaris, decompress it, and then run pkgadd -d <packagename>. As is generally the case with contributed binary packages, these Solaris packages are simple and quick to install. The advantages of compiling from source are that a newer version may be available and you have more flexibility in the build process.