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 over at http://www.sunfreeware.com 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.